Athena’s Donuts at the corner of 16th and Folsom has been open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, since June 1962. Sixty-three years. The same Greek family, first the Papadakis brothers, then their sons, then their grandsons, now their great-grandson, has run it the entire time. The fryer has gone cold three times in 63 years, all of them during the 1989 earthquake, the 2003 transformer fire, and the brief 2020 power outage in the Mission grid.
The current cook on the overnight shift is Stavros Papadakis, 64, son of George Papadakis, grandson of Costas Papadakis, who opened the shop with his brother Demetrios in 1962. Stavros has worked the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift since 1979, 46 years, almost without exception.
The recipe, yeast donuts, glazed; cake donuts; old-fashioned; an apple fritter on Saturdays, was Costas’s. It is written in Greek in a small notebook kept under the cash register. Stavros’s nephew, Niko, age 22, the latest generation, has been learning the recipe for two years. He gets the donuts about 80% right. The remaining 20%, Stavros says, is the difference between a Papadakis donut and just a donut.
The shop has not raised prices on a glazed yeast since 2019 ($1.10). It has not raised the coffee since 2018 ($1.50). A dozen donuts is $12. Stavros says the prices are deliberately low because, he says, donuts at three in the morning are a kind of mercy.
“A donut shop at three in the morning is a public service,” he says. “We are not running a business. We are running a porch light.”
The customers vary by hour. 11 p.m. is the bar-going crowd. 2 a.m. is the bar-leaving crowd. 3:30 a.m. is when the cab drivers come, and the night nurses on a break from Saint Luke’s, and the workers from the produce market on Bryant. 5 a.m. is the early shift at the hospital. 6 a.m. is the construction crews. 7 a.m. is the kids on the way to school and the parents on the way to work.
Stavros knows about 200 of his regulars by name. He keeps a black notebook with each regular’s usual order. The notebook has 41 pages. Each page is a different category: nurses, cabbies, kids, school-bus drivers.
Three Papadakis have died over the years, Costas in 1989, Demetrios in 1996, George (Stavros’s father) in 2014. Three Papadakis have been married in the shop’s back room, Stavros himself in 1985, his sister in 1992, Niko’s mother in 2003. The current wedding photograph on the wall is the most recent one. The funeral programs are in a frame in the office.
Niko, the great-grandson, is studying business at SF State. He has told Stavros he will take over the shop when Stavros is ready to step back. Stavros has not yet named a date. He says the shop will tell him when. Niko has, in the meantime, been working the 5 a.m. shift on Saturdays for nine months. He has been on time every Saturday.
On the Saturday I visited at 3:14 a.m., the shop had four customers: a cab driver named Reggie, two nurses from Saint Luke’s, and a woman named Linda who has come at 3:15 a.m. every Saturday since 2007 for one apple fritter and one cup of coffee. Stavros greeted each of them. He had Linda’s fritter on the counter before she sat down. She did not have to say a word.
