Giving and receiving thanks at Peter Pan

A Brooklyn institution serves donuts as they should be made.

Many donuts have gone into this writing. Many, many donuts. But as with all things you love, one must make sacrifices. And I love Peter Pan donuts.

The coffeeshop stands off Manhattan Avenue in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint. When I lived around the corner, I would spend my weekend mornings there. Since moving further south, I’ve found it difficult to maintain the same level of patronage. But I manage to visit on a cold and sunny Thanksgiving Day.

A gaggle of ladies in teal uniforms and pink hats hands out pastries and smiles as men in pastry toques carry long metal trays of fresh donuts from the back kitchen. Seventeen stools snake through the premises. I sit next to an Italian girl who overenunciates to her father: “Peh-ter Pahn Doh-noot Shohp.” Across from me, a guy eats a cream cheese sesame bagel with his earbuds in while a father works on his toasted coconut donut and FaceTimes his toddler, who immediately recognizes where he is, imploring him to bring back a pink one with sprinkles, please.

I smile as I dunk a sour cream cake donut into delicious burnt coffee. New York can wear me down, but the sugar and din here tend to pick me up again. I overhear a waitress talking about her low blood pressure as she spreads cream cheese over a bagel. “I went to the doctor yesterday. I got 91/61,” she says. Her colleague responds, “Oh no. You need caffeine pills…or maybe just a glass of red wine.”

Despite any crossed wires, the staff have forged a warm amity with one another. Peter Pan’s owner Donna Siafakas, compact and brisk, walks between the angular counter and white backlit signs as pots of coffee bubble into what seems a dreamscape. She hands out cash to each of the waitresses, hugging each and wishing all a happy Thanksgiving. “You’ll hug me tomorrow,” she says to a waitress occupied with a large tray of honey dip donuts, slipping bills into her pocket.

When Donna walks by, she’s quick to tell me how excited she is for her own Thanksgiving plans. “I’m going immediately home, putting on my pajamas, and my husband will make Greek pita with leeks.”

A waitress calls out teasingly, “Do you want to come to Marianne’s with us?” Donna deflects, squeezing into the back kitchen, clearly set on making it home.

Another waitress interrogates a younger customer. “You don’t go to school today? When I was younger, they used to make us go to school on Thanksgiving.”

I’m thankful for these small, warm interactions. I think about how cold the conversations must be at corporate, centralized donut titans like Dunkin’ Donuts and Krispy Kreme. If they’re happening at all. In the baking process, donut holes aren’t created by removing something. Nothing is scooped out, nothing lost. They’re formed whole from the start. Peter Pan works the same way. It doesn’t hollow anything out of you; it fills something in.

In his love-letter essay “Here is New York,” the incomparable E.B. White writes about both the connection and separation the city gives, or forces on, its inhabitants. The elbow room between Peter Pan’s stools reflects that contrast perfectly. Everywhere else, I crave more space. Here, I want to lean in.

I linger at the counter for a final few minutes for a white coconut cream to take home to my partner. A large group pushes into the shop while a waitress dances along to a disco track, “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” by Baccara, as she manipulates the espresso machine. I find myself smiling as she sings over and over to herself the infectious lyrics, “I can boogie, boogie-woogie all night long.”

---

Joshua Levkowitz was an ICWA fellow from 2021-2023 in Turkey, where he wrote about issues related to migration and identity.