In spring, the skies above Carolina Beach fill with white ibises. Undulating lines of them stitch clouds to the blue dome. Flocks of them frost the trees a wintry white. When they appear, it’s a sure sign of spring’s arrival, and it means that soon, Britt’s Donuts will open for the season. For a few fleeting months, the smell of fried dough will fill the air on the Carolina Beach Boardwalk, and bags bulging with doughnuts will fly out the door. It’s part of the natural cycle here.

On a hot and sticky day, the doors to Britt’s are open wide, and the patrons inside are glad for a seat at the counter and a sack of fresh doughnuts. Outside, the line is as unrelenting as an incoming tide. Where there were 20 customers, now there are 50. And counting.

Orders come in a deluge. Two doughnuts. Four. Seven. Eight. A dozen. Someone asks for “as many as you can fit in a bag.”

After 86 years, Britt’s has the perfect doughnut down to a science, delivering them from the fryer to customers in 10 minutes or less. photograph by Matt Ray Photography

It’s been this way for 86 years. Since Britt’s opened in 1939, the long lines have been as much of a mainstay as the doughnuts. Irregularly round, simultaneously crispy and airy, basted with a sugary, vanilla-y, just-slightly-salty glaze — they’re perfect.

You can fit 16 doughnuts comfortably in a bag and still roll it closed. If you’re so bold as to leave the top open — which we do not recommend — you can fit 18. But do so at your peril. The scent of sugar mixes with the salt air to create an irresistible aroma, and as you walk away, it’s sweet torture to those in line. Depending on how long they’ve waited and how full your arms are, they might snatch a doughnut, leaving you with 17.

Some Britt’s devotees have been lining up on the boardwalk for decades, waiting impatiently for freshly fried doughnuts. Others, like Rosalyn Sanchez, are just getting started. photograph by Matt Ray Photography

Even if you make it past them unbothered, you still have an open bag of hot, aromatic doughnuts to contend with, and it requires no effort to reach in, take one from the top, and eat it in four bites. Since a single doughnut leaves your fingers sticky with glaze, it’s easier to eat a second than it is to grab a napkin, and from there, the third is almost too tempting.

Bobby Nivens, white-haired and smiling, hovers near the kitchen. He and his wife, Maxine, have owned Britt’s since 1974. “It makes you feel good to work at something people enjoy,” he says.

• • •

Nivens started working at Britt’s in 1954, making 40 cents an hour. “At the time, I was 14 or 15,” he says, “and a lot of the guys I knew wanted to work as lifeguards here at the beach. I said to them, ‘You just want to sit in the sun all day and talk to the girls.’” He chuckles. “I don’t think I was wrong, but I think I made the better move working for Mr. Britt.”

Owner Harvey Britt took a shine to Nivens, who worked at the shop through high school and stayed in touch once he joined the Air Force.

“I wrote him letters from the Philippines,” Nivens says. “Told him how much I missed home and the doughnut shop. It was a long four years, and I thought about his doughnut shop a lot.”

From left: Having owned Britt’s since 1974, Bobby and Maxine Nivens now work alongside their daughter Lynn Nivens Prusa and granddaughters Halyn Prusa Blackburn and Bobbi Prusa Meyer, as well as Bobbi’s husband, Adam Meyer. photograph by Matt Ray Photography

When Nivens returned home, it didn’t take long before he and Mr. Britt were having a conversation. “Not an ‘employer to a teenage employee’ conversation,” Nivens says. “I had grown up, and it was a man-to-man talk we had.” The discussion turned, eventually, to Britt’s retirement and Nivens’s desire to buy the business.

“He said to me, ‘Bobby, you’re interested in the business — well, here’s the price. Why don’t you go to the bank and see what they’ll do.’”

Nivens was offered a $500 loan, far short of Britt’s asking price — a number Nivens holds as close to the vest as the doughnut recipe. “But I went back to him and told him. He said to take that loan, and we’d work everything else out.”

Nivens took over and hasn’t looked back. The rest is sweet history.

• • •

This year, Carolina Beach celebrates its centennial, and since Britt’s has been a fixture in the town for 86 of those years, Mayor Lynn Barbee calls getting a doughnut there “a rite of passage.”

“If you haven’t been to Britt’s, then you haven’t fully experienced Carolina Beach,” he says.

Britt’s doughnuts drip with a vanilla-y, slightly salty glaze that has customers reaching in their brown paper bags for seconds (and thirds). photograph by Matt Ray Photography

There’s a second rite of passage, though: working at Britt’s. Nivens did it and brought his daughter Lynn Prusa — the next generation to helm the business — into the fold. Mayor Barbee and his son worked there, too. “While it wasn’t my first job, Britt’s is where I learned to work at 14 years old,” he says. “My story is true for hundreds of beach kids. Britt’s has been the preferred place for teenagers to work for generations.”

That multigenerational appeal is part of what’s earned Britt’s its cult following. Another part is the doughnut itself. Another is the if-you-know-you-know hype surrounding the experience. Nobody cares that it’s cash-only. Nobody flinches at the tiny menu: doughnuts, coffee, milk, and soft drinks. Almost nobody minds the long line.

• • •

Since opening day in April, Britt’s has had a crowd of customers waiting for those first doughnuts of the morning, nearly every morning. They gather outside the garage doors in a loose knot that trails off into a serpentine line down the boardwalk. On hot days, they squeeze themselves into slivers of shade, fan sweaty brows, and tell themselves that their delicious reward makes this temporary suffering worth it.

Inside the shop, dough sits in pillowy lumps, waiting for the cutters to stamp out hundreds of doughnuts. The fryer shimmers with heat. Glaze bubbles nearby in the glaze box.

Nivens and Prusa help prep the store to open. No sooner do the first doughnuts come out than the doors go up and customers begin to enter. There’s no hesitation when the first orders “two dozen to go and four to have here. And a milk.”

Most mornings, customers line up outside Britt’s and along the Carolina Beach Boardwalk. photograph by Matt Ray Photography

Other sizable orders come in. Two dozen. Three. A dozen glazed, a dozen plain. Boxes and sacks of these perfect little confections go from dough to fryer to bag to gone in 10 minutes or less. Almost everyone orders two or three to eat right there or on the ride home.

Nivens gazes with pride at the crowded counter, the bustling kitchen, and the mess of people in line to order. Prusa joins him. Her daughters are here working, and a son-in-law. She looks at her father with admiration.

“Another season,” she says, slipping an arm around his waist.

“Another season,” he says. “Want to do it again next spring?”

Britt’s Donuts
13 Carolina Beach Avenue North
Carolina Beach, NC 28428
(910) 707-0755
brittsdonutshop.com