Pandamonium Doughnut fans, here’s the news you’ve been waiting for: you can soon fulfill your craving for Champaign-Urbana’s favorite artisan doughnuts almost any time you want.
Pandamonium Doughnut owners James and Marci Kyung signed a lease Thursday on a storefront location in Southwest Champaign. Their storefront will be located in Windsor Galleria, the same strip mall as Sun Singer Wine and Spirits. The space was formerly occupied by a pizza restaurant and is located off of Windsor Road, across from Morrisey Park.
“We’re at that point where we are ready for the next step and we want to show our customers what more we have in store for them, we have so much more that we want to do,” an exhilarated Kyung said in a phone interview Thursday evening.
Currently, Pandamonium often sells out of donuts and has no way to make more on the fly, because of limited access to a rental kitchen. The storefront will allow the company to make doughnuts all day. More prep space means new types of doughnuts that just weren’t feasible to assemble in the food truck.
The storefront will have a kitchen, interior seating, as well as outdoor seating when the weather cooperates. In addition to serving their namesake doughnuts, the store will operate a full espresso bar. They hope to open “late summerish, early fallish,” Kyung said with a laugh.
The storefront will allow Pandamonium to serve more customers than ever before, something that excites Kyung. The initial plan is to be open earlier than the food truck (6:30? 7?) and to keep slinging doughnuts until late afternoon.
“I think one of the big things is that there are still a lot of people who haven’t had a chance to try our donuts, which has to do with location or our hours,” he said. “For some people it’s not early enough or being on campus, it isn’t favorable to drive to.”
Once the storefront is open, Pandamonium will continue to keep the truck running, but will focus on using it to serve campus patrons. And they have no plans to abandon their popular post at Urbana’s Market at the Square, so don’t worry if that’s your family’s Saturday morning ritual.
“We are always going back there,” Kyung said. “It’s kind of what started it all. We always like to view that as our home.”
Pandamonium Doughnuts is a local entrepreneurial success story. Born out of a passion for baking, Kyung and his then girlfriend started at the market in 2013. The pair met while in school at the University of Illinois and never left.
“We took a chance and brought two tables and two chairs, and 40 doughnuts. We were there sporadically that summer,” he said.
By November 2014, Kyung quit his job and purchased the Pandemonium Doughnuts truck (we wrote about them that fall, too). The couple decided to look for a storefront about a year ago. They worked with local real estate broker Jill Guth of Guth and Associates to find the perfect location – and they think they have it now.
“We love what we’ve been able to do with the food truck,” he said, “but there is so much more that we’ll have the capability to do.”
