DONUTS. I'VE always enjoyed the down-and-outness of donut shops. I've enjoyed the donuts too, but the down and the outness – it's almost even contained in the word: donuts.

Imagine my pleasure, then, at being booted from the downest and the outest, the best damn donut shop in San Francisco. I'm imagining too, because I wasn't booted, technically speaking, so much as asked to wait outside.

But wouldn't it be cool, for future reference, if I, a restaurant reviewer (ostensibly speaking, of course) could somehow sink so low as to be actually unwelcome at one of the welcomingest, open-armedest of American institutions: the all-night donut dive? I'm going to have to put that on my list of things to do. Or check it off. I'm not sure. You tell me.

I was waiting for Alice. Alice, who took me to the sandwich shop where the guy was supposed to tell my fortune but didn't. Alice, who took me to a Giants game where the ticket-taker addressed me as "Steve Young" – possibly the finest (and definitely the most mysterious) compliment I have ever received. (Um, we're both white?)

Anyway, the Happy Donuts sandwich I had at that game sucked ass, so I was going to need a new favorite donut place, and Alice weighed in with Bob's, on Polk. Said if you go at night, after 10, you get to eat them hot out of the oil. Said she'd gone there with Joel, and Joel ate five donuts.

Five donuts is a lot of donuts. Now that I have my girlish figure to worry about, I seldom if ever eat more than four at a sitting. So what was I going to do to impress Alice, eat six?

I was waiting for her, sitting at one of the half dozen or so empty little two-seater tables along the wall of the joint. The table next to mine was broken, topless. I had opened my little notebook and was trying to make a poem out of it.

"Can I help you?" the woman behind the counter called out, eyeballing me like an unattended bag on the floor at the airport.

"I'm meeting someone," I said, smiling sweetly. I'm not a bag.

"You're going to have to wait outside," she said.

This is a donut shop. This is Polk Street. Polk and Sacramento, true, but Bob's is not fine dining. It's a greasy hole-in-the-wall with a worn-out counter, a poemless broken table, an ancient baseball pinball game, a couple of photos of donuts, a dreamy little mural behind the coffee brewers of donuts and cookies in the clouds over a mountain of custard, and, under that, on the counter behind the counter, a fuzzy-screen TV. Old guys watching. In other words: a donut shop! The classic all-night refuge for the mentally bankrupt, derelict philosophers, penniless poets, toothless bastards ... my people!

And I'm going to have to wait outside?

I should of. Then I would have been able to say, unequivocally, that I'd been booted from a donut shop and now my life was complete. But it was cold out. Ten-thirty, Saturday night. There were scary young pretty people waiting in line to get into a fancy-pants dance club on the corner. I was waiting for Alice, and we were going to have coffee and donuts anyway, so ... wordlessly I poured myself my good-faith cup of Farmer Brothers, ordered an old-fashioned cake donut with maple on it, sat back down and started eating without her, mumbling to myself.

Damn, it was a damn good donut. Even the Farmer Brothers, oddly, was hitting the spot. Alice came. More donuts were had. Conversation. Coffee was drank and drank and drank. Now we were both waiting, waiting at the counter now, for the smiley guy to come out with a batch of fresh ones and fry and glaze them before our very eyes. Alice had promised me this, like she had promised me fortune-told sandwiches, and it wasn't happening. She was beginning to get a complex.

You can only eat so many donuts (unless you're Joel), and sip so many cups of Farmer Brothers so slowly, even after you've switched to decaf. We were this close to leaving when, like the first Fourth of July fireworks busting the blank sky, he rolled out of the back of the place with trays and trays of raised ones, and we got to watch them go in, get flipped, get glazed. Ooh. Ah.

And we got to taste them getting eaten, by us, melt-in-your-mouth hot and you know what? Worth the wait.

Bob's Donuts. 1621 Polk (at Sacramento), S.F. (415) 776-3141. Daily, 24 hours. Takeout available. Credit cards not accepted. No alcohol. Wheelchair accessible.

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Dan Leone is the author of Eat This, San Francisco (Sasquatch Books), a collection of Cheap Eats restaurant reviews, and The Meaning of Lunch (Mammoth Books).