DiLo’s Donuts buys a building

By Zander Frost, Chronicle Staff Writer

DiLo’s Heavenly Donuts is becoming DiLo’s Good Eats and Heavenly Sweets — and moving into a permanent home in Hudson Falls.

Chris and Lucia DiLorenzo bought 25 Feeder Street, former home of Bonnie & Clyde’s take-out food business, for $25,000 from the Washington County LDC.

They plan to expand.

“We’re still going to have our doughnuts, obviously,” like their “famous” Holy Cannoli — a donut cannoli, Chris said.

“But we’re going to have an entire new menu as well. Smash burgers, mini-hotdogs that no one has in this area.” Plus appetizers, fries, wings, mozzarella sticks — “the whole nine yards.”

The DiLorenzos intend to do mostly take out, though “we’re going to have outdoor seating, picnic tables, umbrellas.”

The space is tiny, about 416 square feet. But the property is deceptive.

“This building is very small, but I think one of the best parts actually is the basement,” Chris said. He said their goal “is to turn the basement into basically her [Lucia’s] bakery so she can do her carrot cake and the cannolis that we’re known for.”

Beyond the building, “it’s a huge piece of property — at least a football field long,” Chris said. “I didn’t realize until I actually purchased it how big it is.”

He said it extends east to the edge of the Feeder Street Cumberland Farms and west to the “white house.”

Chris said his “vision” is to pave the entire lot, and turn it into something “like Mr. Bill’s” with a snack bar, “maybe ice cream….I’ve got big plans for this.”

The DiLorenzos started making doughnuts out of their home in 2020.

In 2021 they established their donut trailer in Glens Falls, first stationed on a lot on Broad Street and then moved onto the former Rite Aid South Street parking lot. They operated during the summer.

Now, the trailer will be stationed permanently at their Hudson Falls location.

“I learned about 800 ways how not to make donuts before I figured out how to make donuts,” Chris said. “And it all just snowballed from there.”

Lucia is from Florida.

Chris is from Queensbury and also works as a barber at Rad Razors in Glens Falls. He said he’ll keep cutting hair.

“I have to. That kind of fuels all my other endeavors.”

He said they had been looking at the property for some time. He said the initial asking price was too high, and he didn’t know it was in pre-foreclosure.

Later, it went to public auction. Chris said someone with the County alerted him to the auction, “and I wrote it down and I got busy and forgot all about it.”

Chris said the same woman from the County approached him after no one showed up to bid at the public auction.

So Chris made an offer, “and two weeks later the board voted” to accept it, he said.

Chris said the new space makes everything else easier. “There’s only so much you can do in one of those trailers,” he said. “There’s no heat or air conditioning. The temperature really determines what you can do out of there.”

“If the humidity is off, if the temperature is too hot, too cold, then stuff doesn’t rise,” he said. “It’s just very, very hard to keep a consistent product.

“We did the best we could with what he had. But this has really taken it to the next level.”

Chris said, “The Lord blessed us with a donut trailer. And it just really snowballed from there. We actually looked at this location over a year ago. And God just really moved, man. He placed the right people at the right time in our lives, and it came to fruition.”

Copyright © 2024 Lone Oak Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved