At 3:45 a.m. each Friday morning, Sean Carmack crawls out of bed, trudges into the kitchen of his North Borthwick home, turns on some music (maybe an episode of The Daily), and begins making doughnuts and coffee. He dips bronzed rings into glazes fragrant
with black walnut or rose, fries cinnamon rolls swirled with cardamom, and fills airpots with the coffee his friend roasts for him. By 8:05 a.m., Sean has turned the entryway of his 1909 single-family house into a doughnut shop, lugging a makeshift coffee station into the threshold of his living room and setting up a doughnut case on the stairwell-side bench where his 9- and 6-year-olds tie their shoes on other, quieter mornings. Neighborhood regulars know to get there early, passing the overgrown raised garden beds and letting themselves in.
Several generations of Carmacks have started their mornings in similar ways. First in 1953, when his great-grandparents, Harold and Sarah Carmack, opened a franchise ice cream and treat shop in Bountiful, Utah: They started selling Spudnuts, a style of potato doughnut popularized in the mid-20th century by Utah-based chain of the same name. Then Sean’s grandfather, Don, began working there, helping with the doughnuts and coffee ahead of the original Carmack’s 6 a.m. open. Sean’s father worked there, as did his aunts and uncles; after the Spudnut parent company went out of business, the family altered the recipe, making it their own. They also expanded the scope of what Carmack’s was — a cheeseburger-slinging luncheonette, a breakfast cafe, a community center — until the original location suffered a fire in 1997, and did not reopen. Still, the family didn’t let go of their memory of the business. “Ever since then, our whole family has just been like, ‘Man, that shouldn’t have happened,’” he says. “We ended up on a weird timeline.”
Sean moved to Oregon and spent 15 years in the tech industry. But he fantasized about reviving Carmack’s in some way, even if it were 750 miles from the OG shop. It wasn’t until October 2025, when he was laid off from his job, that he got serious about potato doughnuts. “We’ve got strong cottage industry laws, and so I was, like, really running out of excuses,” he says, sitting in his living room after a Friday shift, hair tousled and shoes off. He opened up his house to doughnut seekers in January 2026, and it didn’t take long to turn heads. Comedian Brandon Lyons visited the Carmack home in the spring, during his two-month-long, 50-shop doughnut tour of the city, and called it Portland’s third-best doughnut in a May video for Travel Portland.
What makes a potato doughnut special is how the starch interacts with moisture. American home cooks often added potatoes to doughs in early 20th-century kitchens because it allowed families to stretch ingredients during World War II, when wheat flours were hard to find. But potato starches also bind to moisture, which makes the dough pliable and workable before entering the fryer, and keep the doughnuts tender and flavorful in the case. Plus, that added starch helps keep the doughnuts fluffy inside.
While potatoes can be applied to cake doughnuts, Carmack’s are a light and airy raised variety. Sean is adamant that his doughnuts stay simple, with little more than a single glaze or a dunk in a spiced sugar mixture. “Generally speaking, outside of Portland, so many [doughnut] shops are using a [dough] mix, right? So the way they have to stand apart from each other is with what’s on top of it,” Sean says. “I wanted something that’s not crazy sweet, has a unique flavor, is light and fluffy, and I’m finding that’s really resonating with people. It’s not an over-the-top doughnut.”
On this Friday morning, Sean opens the “shop” with his mom, Mari Sisti, and Walter, the 12-year-old mutt, stocking the case with six flavors of rings and two cinnamon rolls. Many flavors are pretty standard — chocolate frosted, raised glazed, strawberry — though Carmack’s has become well-known for the earthy black walnut-glazed ring and its aromatic rose-glazed doughnut flecked with rose petals.
At 1 p.m. that day, after the shop typically closes , a customer wanders in; Carmack’s “Please come in” sign is still hanging on the door. Walter greets the customer with a friendly yowl, and Sean hops up, pointing out each of the doughnuts in the case as she leans over, investigating the lip gloss-pink strawberry and cinnamon-cardamom sugar. “Where’s the iPad, ma?” he calls, and Mari appears at his side, emerging from the kitchen behind them.
The literally homemade doughnuts are a clear part of Carmack’s charm, but Sean hopes to evolve beyond that in the future, the same way the original Carmack’s did. He’s in the process of fixing up a step van retired from a career in public service (the previous owner was the City of San Francisco), which he’s hoping to turn into a roving doughnut mobile, setting up near (or even in) Portland parks or rolling up to soccer games. He wants to expand the menu — he’s not sure how just yet — and, in the long run, open an Oregon storefront. “I need a brick-and-mortar to really do Carmack’s the way that it was, the type of place it was in the community,” Sean says. “The big, hairy, audacious goal is to reopen in the original location.”
Carmack’s is located at 5927 N Borthwick Avenue; open 8:05 a.m. to noon, Thursday through Sunday.
