Sidecar Doughnuts and Coffee

East 17th Street and the Case for Serious Doughnuts

Costa Mesa's dining identity is built around South Coast Plaza and the cluster of high-end restaurants that serve it. Knife Pleat and Hana re sit at the formal end of that spectrum, alongside Mastro's Ocean Club, Vaca, and ANQI. But the city's culinary credibility doesn't begin and end with prix-fixe formats and tasting menus. East 17th Street, roughly two miles north of the mall, runs through a quieter, more residential stretch of Costa Mesa where the restaurants and cafes serve a local clientele rather than a hotel guest or a special-occasion crowd. It is here, in a strip mall at number 270, that Sidecar Doughnuts and Coffee operates, and where the argument for taking doughnuts as seriously as any other food category gets made most clearly in Southern California.

Strip mall placement is not incidental context. In Orange County, the strip mall is a legitimate culinary venue type, often housing some of the county's most focused and technically serious cooking. The format rewards operators who don't need foot traffic from a destination shopping address, who rely instead on reputation and repeat customers. Sidecar fits that model precisely. The shop sits in a low-key retail row, identifiable by the line that forms before most of Costa Mesa's other restaurants have unlocked their doors.

A Cheap Eats Ranking That Carries Weight

In the broader hierarchy of food criticism, Opinionated About Dining occupies a specific and respected position. The platform applies a structured, data-driven methodology to restaurant evaluation, and its Cheap Eats lists are taken seriously by food professionals in a way that generic crowd-sourced rankings are not. Sidecar Doughnuts and Coffee has appeared on the OAD North America Cheap Eats ranking three consecutive years: ranked #6 in 2023, #9 in 2024, and #9 again in 2025. That kind of sustained placement, across multiple evaluation cycles, is a different signal than a single-year appearance. It suggests consistent execution rather than a moment of novelty.

For comparison, very few doughnut-specific operations earn this kind of placement on lists that also include full-service restaurants and chef-driven counter concepts. The ranking places Sidecar in a peer conversation that extends well beyond Orange County. Blue Star Donuts in Portland and Donut Pub in New York City represent the kind of category-defining operations that serious doughnut shops are measured against nationally. Sidecar's OAD trajectory puts it in that tier of conversation, even if its address, Costa Mesa rather than a major coastal city, means it remains less broadly referenced than it deserves to be.

The shop also carries a 4.6 rating across 2,379 Google reviews. At over two thousand reviews, statistical noise compresses and the rating becomes a reasonable proxy for consistent experience.

The Doughnut as a Technical Category

American artisan doughnuts have undergone a genuine shift in the past decade. The category moved from a largely industrial product, mass-produced, shelf-stable, consistent but unambitious, toward a small-batch, high-turnover model where ingredient sourcing, fry temperature, and glaze composition are treated with the same attention given to pastry in a serious bakery. The West Coast led much of that shift, with Portland and Los Angeles establishing the expectations that other markets now reference.

What the OAD ranking signals, implicitly, is that Sidecar operates in that serious-craft tier. The shop is run by Sumter and Chi-Lin Pendergrast, and it opens at 6:30 am daily, with later hours on Fridays and Saturdays. Doughnuts don't hold the way a braise or a cheese course does. The extended Friday and Saturday hours suggest the shop is serving an evening crowd as well, which is unusual for the category and speaks to a different kind of positioning within the neighbourhood.

Sidecar opens at 6:30 am every day of the week, which makes it one of the earlier openings in Costa Mesa's dining map. Monday through Thursday and Sunday, the shop closes at 7 pm. Friday and Saturday hours run to 10 pm, making those evenings a realistic add-on to a broader Costa Mesa itinerary that might start with dinner at one of the city's table-service restaurants and finish here. The address, 270 E 17th St, Suite 18, Costa Mesa, is in a strip mall complex, so plan for lot parking rather than street-side arrival.

For those using Costa Mesa as a base to reach broader Southern California or farther-afield dining, it is worth noting that the OAD Cheap Eats methodology places Sidecar in national company. The same evaluative culture that informs rankings at Le Bernardin, Alinea, The French Laundry, Lazy Bear, Single Thread Farm, and Emeril's at the high-end also produces the Cheap Eats lists where Sidecar has held a top-ten position for three consecutive years. That is a meaningful credential and reframes what a Costa Mesa doughnut stop represents.