Changing Tides Cafe & Donut Shop
For best friends Dawn Pantano and Sharon Pozzi-Thomas, Changing Tides Cafe & Donut Shop (92 Pleasant St., Newburyport, Mass., 978-572-1284, changingtidescafe.com) was the culmination of a longtime dream. Both women are licensed CPAs, each with a few decades of experience to her credit. But when they’re at the cafe, it doesn’t feel like a job — the name, Pozzi-Thomas said, is even reflective of the pair’s life and career changes. “We’ve always been passionate about coffee and doughnuts, [and] I’ve been eating a doughnut every day of my life for probably 18 or 19 years now,” Pozzi-Thomas said. The shop offers its own hand-cut cake and yeast doughnuts baked every day in a variety of flavors, along with a selection of muffins, scones, bagels, avocado toasts and acai bowls. A full coffee and espresso bar is also available featuring George Howell specialty coffees, and there are loose leaf teas courtesy of Rishi Tea. When the pandemic hit, Pantano and Pozzi-Thomas decided to launch a coffee and doughnut truck, which continues to appear at public and private events. The Scene recently caught up with the two friends to talk about their doughnut-making specialties and some of their picks for must-try items the next time you visit their shop or see their truck out on the road.
How long has Changing Tides Cafe & Donut Shop been around?
Pantano: [Since] March of 2019, so just a little over three years.
What makes Changing Tides Cafe & Donut Shop unique?
Pozzi-Thomas: We have a great baking team, and everything is hand cut, made in house and fried in the front window the same day. Nothing is kept overnight; everything is handmade every single day. We’re also in an older building, and so we wanted to go old-school. We have very traditional doughnuts that people may remember from their childhood, so old-fashioned cake chocolate, cake blueberry, cake apple, and then fluffier doughnuts that you’d refer to as yeast, or raised, doughnuts. … We don’t really do crazy flavors, and that is also very calculated.
Pantano: We also try to make it be a place that somebody wants to come to, so almost like their third place [after] their home and their office. Just a place where you’re feeling comfortable and happy.
What is your personal favorite thing on your menu?
Pozzi-Thomas: The espresso tonic is my favorite drink, and then I’m torn between the acai bowl and the triple chocolate doughnut. Those are my three go-to items.
Pantano: I would go with a macadamia nut latte, and I love our egg sandwiches. We’ve got a lot of positive feedback from those. They are cooked to order, and they are absolutely delicious.
What is something that everyone should try?
Pozzi-Thomas: The cinnamon roll, which is made out of a fluffy doughnut, and also our scones. The raspberry white chocolate chip scone is so good.
Pantano: The multi-berry scone with an orange glaze.
What celebrity would you like to see ordering from the shop?
Pantano: George Clooney, a hundred percent.
Pozzi-Thomas: Julia Roberts for me. I love her.
What is an essential skill to running a cafe and doughnut shop?
Pozzi-Thomas: Treat others the way you want to be treated — staff, guests and everyone in between. That is how we run our business. I really do think we’ve never lost sight of that.
What is your favorite thing about being on the Seacoast?
Pantano: I just love being able to be at the ocean or see the water when you’re walking around. There’s just something so spiritual about it.
Pozzi-Thomas: The people of Newburyport. There’s a vibe there that can’t be beat. It’s hard to explain, really, until you’ve experienced it.
— Matt Ingersoll
Courtesy photo.
