Although no one has tasted as much as a single doughnut, Shortstop Coffee & Donuts has more than 16,000 followers on Instagram. Anthony Ivey and Sinye Ooi's doughnut shop and cafe is still being fitted out on Sutherland Street in the CBD, and is slated to open in mid September.

The long and the short of it is: Shortstop has been a long time coming.

Ivey, who has worked across Melbourne’s specialty coffee scene for the past six years (most recently at Market Lane), took a two-and-a-half week intensive research trip to the States and Canada earlier this year. He hit up six cities in 16 days, and put on six kilos.

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Ivey is dead serious about making the best doughnuts in the world, so travelling to North America was necessary. He traversed LA, NY, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver and San Francisco and documented the doughnuts he consumed and the pastry chefs he met via Instagram, which then snowballed into an enthusiastic social-media following.

The culmination of all this work is a menu of four doughnut varieties: a yeast-raised ring doughnut, a yeast-raised filled doughnut, a “cake doughnut” (a different recipe that is less common in Melbourne) and a French cruller (a choux pastry piped in a circle and fried). The cruller has a basic glaze of Australian honey and sea salt and, according to Ivey, is killer with a simple filter coffee.

Ivey makes special mention of the Earl Grey-flavoured cake doughnut, too, filled with lemon-myrtle gel and dipped in rose-petal and rose-water icing.

Considering all the work put into this high-end doughnut, the price point isn’t so bad – $4 to $5 seems fair to part with for these delicacies.

Although American coffee isn’t exactly renowned for its quality, Shortstop will be echoing the clarity of the Yankee style – both espresso and filter, black or white, one size only.

Shortstop Coffee & Donuts

12 Sutherland Street, Melbourne

Mon to Fri 7.30am–4.30pm

short-stop.com.au