Buritt Bulloch, who turns 88 this year, can still be found making doughnuts in the front window of his shop on the South Side of Chicago. Old Fashioned Donuts opened in the Roseland neighborhood in 1972. The featherlight raised glazed has flown off the shelf since the beginning, but his cult favorite apple fritter didn’t come until later.
Mr. B, as he’s been known to longtime regulars, or increasingly as the Donut King, used to tell me unprompted how many more years he’s got in him to make doughnuts. But not recently, and I didn’t ask, because I don’t want to know. You know where to find him, for now.
The following interview, my latest in our food icon series, has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: What is your full name?
A: “Buritt Lenwood Bulloch.”
Q: When were you born?
A: “Oct. 5, 1938.”
Q: Where were you born?
A: “Holly Springs, Mississippi.”
Bulloch was born and raised in a big family on a small farm.
He married Mamie Rayford on Dec. 20, 1958. They had their daughter Marquita (who now goes by Tina Dunn), then son Daryl and finally daughter Michele.
Q: “What was your first job?
A: “I worked at a company that manufactured brick for three or four years in Mississippi back in the ’60s.”
That was after working on the family farm.
Q: When did you come to Chicago?
A: “I came to Chicago in September of 1963.”
It was his older brother who moved to the city first in the late 1950s, but went back south temporarily to his hometown in 1962. Then the following fall, he headed up north again.
“I just jumped in the car,” said Bulloch. “And came back with him.”
Q: How did he go from bricks to doughnuts?
A: “I do have a lot of cooks in my family, so it wasn’t no big deal for me to pick it up. When I came here, after a couple months, I got hired with Amy Joy’s, and it was so interesting and intriguing, and I just kept at it.”
That was the Amy Joy Donuts location at Lincoln and Kimball avenues in what’s now called the North Park neighborhood.
“I got into the doughnut business and couldn’t let go,” Bulloch said.
Q: What is your business’s full name?
A: “Old Fashioned Donuts Inc.”
The Bullochs opened the Black-owned business on a Friday morning in 1972.
Q: What is your business title?
A: “Owner.”
He and his wife rented the space before buying the building five years later in 1977.
Q: What is your bestselling item?
A: “The regular glazed doughnuts.”
Q: What’s his favorite doughnut to make?
A: “They all about the same,” said Bulloch, laughing. “Maybe the extra-large doughnut I named the Texas style.”
Mr. B’s famous apple fritters are also big, but heavy with fruit, and available with or without crushed pecans on top. He made fritters at Amy Joy, and later at a Huck Finn location, but not at his own shop in the beginning. It was a 5th District police officer friend who coaxed Bulloch into making apple fritters.
Q: What’s his favorite item on the menu to eat, sweet or savory?
A: “I like the cake doughnut. They all are good, especially when you first make them.”
He’ll have a hamburger maybe once a month from the grill side.
Q: What was your most memorable moment?
A: “The first day I had a lobby full of customers.”
Kids from schools in the area came first, twice a day during the week. They started bringing their parents on the weekends. Within a couple of months, it was standing room only.
Mamie Bulloch died in 2009, after nearly 51 years of marriage and 37 years of working side by side.
“Tina and Michele come back to help me after their mom passed,” Bulloch said about his daughters. “They’ve been with me ever since.”
He also has “a lady friend” who lives with him in Crete, about 20 miles south of the shop.
“We’ve been around together about 13 years,” said Bulloch. “She cooks so much stuff.”
His son, Daryl, died in 2017.
“Some form of cancer took him out,” he said.
Mr. B has two grandchildren. Granddaughter Drejuana Bulloch, Michele’s daughter, worked at the shop during the pandemic and through the George Floyd protests in 2020. After rioters broke the front window, she organized a GoFundMe for repairs with her cousin Leda Edwards, Tina’s daughter. Their goal was only $1,000, but donors gave $25,980.
Q: As a Chicago food icon, what are a few words of wisdom you could share with the next generation?
A: “Work hard.”
But Bulloch played hard too on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
“I used to ride cross country quite a bit during the summer back in the late ’70s and all the ’80s,” he said. “Me and a couple friends of mine, we used to ride out to Colorado all the time.”
Bulloch took his longest ride in the summer of 1983.
“We rode to Seattle, Washington, down to Portland, Oregon, into California, and back here,” he said. “When I got home, I had rode in two weeks close to 6,000 miles.”
Those long rides went on until the early 1990s.
“The last ride I took was from my house to Roseland and back,” said Bulloch. “That was the last one I had on my Harley.”
He sold his motorcycle two summers ago, to a guy who was a customer and who has since sold it on.
These days, Mr. B still works hard, but a little bit less.
“I got two other guys working with me now and they’ve been starting the doughnuts up early,” he said. “I’m usually here now by 9 or 10 o’clock in the morning.”
The morning doughnut makers usually leave around 4 in the afternoon.
“Whatever’s needed after that, I just do it myself.”
Old Fashioned Donuts, 11248 S. Michigan Ave., 773-995-7420, facebook.com/oldfashioneddonuts
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