Mr. Bill’s
Location: 138 N. Woodland Blvd., DeLand
Cuisine: American, breakfast, lunch
Hours: 6 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday-Friday, 7 a.m.- noon Saturday, closed on Sunday
Handicap-accessible: Yes
Contact: Find Mr. Bill’s on Facebook, or contact the store by phone at 386-943-8616.
Like most people, I’m asleep at 2 a.m. most weekdays, but if everyone were asleep at 2 a.m., there wouldn’t be anyone to make the doughnuts.
Sure, he could flash-freeze baked goods and defrost them the next day, but Billy Reader does things the old-fashioned way. The way his dad, “Mr. Bill,” taught him.
While everyone but the most intrepid night owls have cleared out of Downtown DeLand, Reader turns the key and flicks on the lights.
Like many DeLandites, I have fond memories of Mr. Bill’s doughnuts as a rare treat when I was growing up. The classic glazed doughnuts take me right back to being a DeLand kid. I’m not alone in that, either.
“A lot of people have nostalgia for this place because they were brought here as kids,” Reader said.
The store still has competition nowadays — franchised bakeries like Dunkin’ and Starbucks are also open when people are driving to work and need a pick-me-up — but bakeries that actually fry doughnuts fresh every morning are rare.
GRAND OPENING — A family photo captures the grand opening of Mr. Bill’s in 1993. Then-owner Bill Reader is pictured at right, smiling, while his sister, Kathy, pokes her head around the kitchen wall. Now-owner and Mr. Bill’s son, Billy Reader, is picking out a doughnut for his taste tester and niece, Christina.
It’s an art form, Reader said, and it’s one that he cherishes.
“You’re providing something that might not be around one day,” he told The Beacon.
Reader has fond memories of waking up before the sun and going in to work with his dad at the Panama City Beach doughnut stand his dad operated in the 1980s.
“It was a trailer — two trailers put together,” Reader said. “One side was a doughnut shop, the other was a taco stand.”
After a long shift of making doughnuts, Reader would take a well-deserved rest on the 50-pound bag of doughnut mix in the back of the trailer.
For Bill Reader Sr., baking was a relief from the retail jobs he worked for decades.
WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENS — Mr. Bill’s storefront, pictured here, is right at the heart of Downtown DeLand, between Rich and Indiana avenues. If you’re looking to get doughnuts from the store, make sure to get there early. It’s not uncommon for the store to sell out of doughnuts hours before they close at 2 p.m. on weekdays.
“I just always enjoyed doing things with my hands,” Reader Sr. said. “I’ve always been a crafter, ever since junior-high school. I wasn’t involved with food, but I was always drawing, or crafting or making something.”
Doughnuts, he said, seemed like a more fun and profitable way to make a living than working as a manager in the retail world.
So the family moved to DeLand. Reader Sr.’s wife was originally from the city, and they got a spot for their new doughnut shop right in the heart of Downtown DeLand.
Mr. Bill’s opened in 1993, and Reader Sr. ran the operation until the early 2010s, when he was looking to retire. That’s when Reader Jr. and his wife bought the store — with a friends-and-family discount, he said — and carried on the family business.
Annually, Reader Jr. estimated, the shop makes around 100,000 doughnuts. That means, in the roughly 10 years they’ve been running Mr. Bill’s, Reader Jr. said, he estimates they’ve made more than 1 million doughnuts.
“How many people can say they’ve made a million of something?” Reader Jr. said. “It’s definitely motivating. It pumps you up a little bit and makes you want to go, ‘Can I do two, three?’”
Nowadays, the breakfast business is good, Reader Jr. said, but the Downtown DeLand eatery is looking to become more well-known for its lunch offerings, too.
While Mr. Bill’s closes most days at 2 p.m., the restaurant offers sandwiches for lunch like egg salad sandwiches, club sandwiches and burgers. Having already had one of their delicious egg salad sandwiches, I recently tried a cheeseburger from Mr. Bill’s.
A BAKER FOR LIFE — A young Billy Reader is pictured here showing off something he was, in his words, “attempting to bake” as a kid. He got the hang of it eventually, though, and nowadays Reader estimates he and the staff at Mr. Bill’s make around 100,000 doughnuts a year.
DeLand has no shortage of places where a hungry person can get a burger, and while my burger from Mr. Bill’s didn’t knock my socks off, it’s hard to go wrong with a diner-style cheeseburger that costs less than $10. Plus, unlike many Downtown DeLand eateries, Mr. Bill’s is open on Mondays.
As for breakfast, Mr. Bill’s is hard to beat. My go-to order is an apple fritter. It’s the perfect combo of crunchy and soft with a bona fide apple taste that can’t be replicated with packaged products.
That nostalgia is hard to beat, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.
With a 30-year history, Mr. Bill’s is one of the older businesses still standing in Downtown DeLand, and the Readers are proud to be a part of that legacy.
“I have a lot of respect for the businesses that came before us,” Reader Jr. said. “It’s rewarding. It’s a community.”
One dream he has for the store, he said, is to have signs of DeLand businesses from years gone by displayed proudly inside Mr. Bill’s.
So what’s next for the DeLand institution? Other than the 2-millionth doughnut and the 3-millionth doughnut, Reader is looking to build out the shop’s lunch menu. Maybe next, he said, is the 1-millionth burger.
Just went this morning and bought two dozen donuts. Yea, it cost a pretty penny. But guess what? Those damn donuts are YUM!!! Oh my God. Went first thing this morning, I didn’t realize that this was owned by the son and his wife, so that’s who must have been there. Nice people. Nice fresh donuts. Great selection and they are NOT gooey or stale or heavy. They are just YUM!! Oh, when you get home, brew a fresh cup of coffee and have your donut. Your stomach will thank you. Mine did, after I ate FOUR!!!!