Restaurant review: Dunkin Donuts (Riverdale)

I was surprised by how much I liked my lunch here. In order to get a healthy ("healthy" meaning "diverse" - the lunch itself was not healthy at all) sampling of their fare, I ordered a toasted bagel with cream cheese, an iced coffee and a jelly doughnut.

This being my first time buying a bagel and coffee from a bona fide "fast food" establishment, I was hoping to get the whole meal for under $5. I paid a little under $6. Given food prices these days, that is totally legitimate on DD's part; it's hard to imagine them making much of a profit on even that. And a little bit of internet searching seems to indicate that they don't charge a premium on account of the hashgacha.

What really set the place apart though was the quality of the food. Granted, making a good bagel, iced coffee and doughnut isn't rocket science. You'd be surprised, though, at how badly some places do it. The bagel is often either burned or heated for so long that the cream cheese melts into a runny mess. And the coffee is across-the-board horrible. DD's bagel was just right, and their coffee - as always - was fantastic. The doughnut was great, too, though not really necessary in the end. I just kind of felt silly going to Dunkin Donuts and not getting a Donut.

Finally, the dining experience was great. The place is rommy, full of sunlight and clean. From what I've read, this is generally true among most American fast food restaurants. Although no one considers them "classy" they are definitely kept spotless. Part of the reason places like McDonalds are so popular overseas is that they are often the cleanest, roomiest, brightest and best-air-conditioned public places in the whole city. The Riverdale DD was far cleaner than a typical pizza place in the heights, or falafel shack in midtown.

While I ate, I thought about this last point. Was this restaurant so clean and pleasant because its managers and operators were far more talented than those of the typical kosher restaurant? It seems to me that the difference lies in the fact that Dunkin Donuts is a corporate establishment that has decades of experience in creating quality restaurants. Whoever manages that store is essentially following a very good set of instructions he/she received from DD, not to mention some sort of corporate budget.

I think that, for certain kinds of restaurants, you can benefit greatly by separating the management and the kashrut. You simply end up with a better product overall. I think that once kosher businesspeople figure this out, we will see a lot more that kosher Dunkin Donuts and kohser Subways. Imainge if Domino's opened a kosher store on the upper west side. A store under Domino's management would be far better equipped to handle, say, pizza deliveries than your average kosher pizzeria. That's because Domino's has been delivering pizzas forever. They have a fleet of pizza delivery men/women. They have pizza delivery apparatus. They know what they are doing. And in terms of business, there's no reason why a non-kosher consumer wouldn't order from them either. If they call in an order for pepperoni pizza, just pass the order along to one of the dozens of other Domino's stores nearby.

I think there is potential.