When dreaming up new doughnut flavors, not many people would look to salad for inspiration. But Justin Newstrum never did have a typical relationship with doughnuts.

In more than two decades of cooking in Seattle, Newstrum has hopped back and forth between pastry chef roles and cooking on the savory side of restaurant kitchens. In 2018, he started making doughnuts to sell at local farmers markets. But rather than fry up stacks of old-fashioneds or adorn cake doughnuts with familiar chocolate or pink icing, he tapped into his cooking background.

Take “the standard little salad you get from any bistro,” says Newstrum. “You’ve got shaved fennel, you’ve got apple slices, you’ve got a lemon vinaigrette.” Ergo, an apple and fennel fritter glazed with a dash of lemon. An autumn-time butternut squash cake doughnut might come with a brown butter and sage glaze. His combinations vary wildly but are always deeply culinary. Don’t come here looking for a doughnut dusted in Froot Loops; Ninth and Hennepin doesn’t even do sprinkles.

When the pandemic hit and farmers markets paused, Newstrum started selling doughnuts from a takeout window in his commissary kitchen in Delridge. Once again, the setup confounds our working knowledge of what it means to buy a doughnut. Customers preorder online. He makes four types of doughnuts at a time, every installment different from what came the week before. Generally it’s one cake doughnut and one filled brioche, a fritter of some sort and a “wild card.” Often that’s a second, very different flavor of cake doughnut, though it could also be a buttermilk bar, a cruller, or something made with semolina, potato, even broken rice. This distinct business model yielded a passionate following.

Like any good chef, Newstrum builds his menus from seasonal produce and makes all his components from scratch. Over the course of a year, you could see elderflower-pear or apple-date fritters, lemon-ricotta cake doughnuts, chocolate brioche filled with almond butter pudding. But his biggest nod to hot-side restaurant culture is his refusal to fry up a doughnut until you order it. The way a chef at a restaurant doesn’t generally cook a bunch of steaks and pasta entrees, then hope someone will come in to eat them.

“The entire business is built on that idea,” says Newstrum of frying his doughnuts to order. Which means you’ll never see his wares on display in a glass case, the scenario you find in most doughnut shops. When you show up for a prearranged order, the person working the window will press a compostable container into your hands that radiates the particular warmth of something freshly cooked. And the nice thing about a four-item doughnut menu—it feels entirely reasonable to order one of everything.

Newstrum sticks to this protocol on the doughnut truck that he operates a few days a week, a way to get back out to neighborhoods beyond West Seattle. He’s toying with the idea of a full brick-and-mortar shop, but the takeout window will remain no matter what, he says. “The community is very protective and supportive there.” The newish truck doesn’t take preorders, and serves a fried-to-order doughnut lineup that’s separate from the window’s weekly offerings. Newstrum posts the day’s truck menu on his Instagram stories, then it disappears forever—the way a restaurant might run a fresh sheet of weekly specials.