Red’s Donuts team toils through the night for morning rush.

At 10pm on a Tuesday, stoplights along Seaside’s Fremont Boulevard go green, yellow and red, but only an occasional lonely driver cares. In the cluster of car dealerships at the Seaside Auto Center, shiny cars sit in lowly lit rows, like an eerily dormant army.

Across the street from the dark lot sits a brightly lit storefront. While many are getting ready for bed, the team at Red’s Donuts is just getting its day started.

Trays of treats they’ve already made fill a glass display case by the entrance to the kitchen, and it’s quite an arsenal for only a half-hour of work: dozens of golden cake donuts, maple bars with light brown glaze oozing down the sides, old fashioneds in deliciously irregular shapes.

The cluttered kitchen space is heavy with a sweat-inducing heat pouring from a fryer boiling oil at 357 degrees. A 140-quart commercial food mixer, two dough proofers and a stainless steel preparation table line the walls.

Two men stand over their stations, one man cutting dough on a table then twisting pieces of dough into artful ribbons, the other plopping plump yeast donuts in a plastic tub of chocolate glaze at a table covered with newspaper.

Hector Perez uses two wooden sticks to flip donuts in the fryer. It’s a rapid technique he’s refined working at Red’s for eight years. He flips the donuts so fast – revealing their golden-brown cooked sides – he could pass for a character in the 1990s Street Fighter video game.

Perez works the night shift, leaving as late as 4 in the morning.

“The hours are odd, but not that bad,” Perez says. “You learn to adapt.”

One moment he’s coating donuts in glazes made from a mixture of powdered sugar and water, the next he’s dispensing curtains of icing over cinnamon rolls.

They’re just beautiful – and a big reason Red’s two locations fill up each morning. But Perez isn’t in it for the sweet rewards.

“No me gustan, I don’t really like donuts,” Perez says with a laugh. “Just the plain sometimes.”

To reach this swirl of odd-hours activity, you have to pass through the dining room that soon becomes as active as the kitchen, with the counter and tables full with regulars as early as 7 in the morning. (They open for business at 4am.) On a recent morning, five Red’s employees scrambled behind the counter to take orders of single donuts or four dozen. As locals trade banter, it’s apparent why one regular in Monterey once described the mood at Red’s as “a breakfast Cheers.”

On this Tuesday night, the blue barstools with cracked leather border a spotless counter. Matthew O’Donnell sits at the end of a counter sipping a cup of coffee. O’Donnell, along with his sister, Kathi Saunders, owns Red’s Donuts.

“In a way, stuff like The Simpsons started this donut renaissance,” he says. “Now people want donuts for birthdays, weddings, any occasion.”

O’Donnell is jolly, cracking jokes about how donuts calm his customers amid a terrifying election season. He riffs on gluten-free, healthy and hipster/experimental donut trends, resolving to stick with the way Red’s does things.

“We’re not Voodoo Donuts,” he says.

The dining room walls are covered in fading photographs of clowns, bold colorful portraits of clowns crying or laughing, and marionette clowns with blank expressions hanging over the counter. A friend of his father’s worked for Disney in the 1950s and gave him a clown painting. From there, customers started bringing in their own clown swag.

Other decorations include a giant classic Coca Cola sign, a cork bulletin board full of staff members’ family photos and little signs with sayings like “Keep Calm and Eat a Donut” and “New Productivity Incentive: Work or Get Fired!”

When O’Donnell unlocks the door to the kitchen, the sweet scent of sugary dough freshly cooking rushes out.

He looks down at the rows of finished donuts like a proud father.

“People from far away come back and tell me they remember our donuts from when they were living here,” he says, smiling. “It’s the quality that keeps them coming back.”

The quality doesn’t come easy. Red’s could use conveyor belts and automated flippers and save a ton of time and human hustle, but they stick to the way Herman O’Donnell did it.

He was the one they called “Red,” after all – thanks to his auburn hair.

O’Donnell, who worked the night shift for many years, has different feelings about the atypical schedule than Perez.

“I never got used to it: Your mind stays in that time pattern when you’re off work, and it’s not natural,” O’Donnell says. “I would get home and sleep at 6 in the morning and would get up around noon. It’s hard to sleep during the day with all the neighbors making noise.”

At a flour-coated table by one of the shop’s windows, Joe Kraintz rigorously rolls out a mound of dough the size of a sack of flour. Tonight, Kraintz will roll out 180 pounds of dough.

He’s used to long manual sessions, having baked most of his adult life, working at an uncle’s Monterey bakery for six years, and with Red’s since President Ronald Reagan was leaving office.

“If I didn’t like doing it, I would’ve left a long time ago,” Kraintz says, reaching for a rolling-pin-like tool with a metal mold for donut rings. Part of the appeal for Kraintz lies in the fact that he’s invested time in perfecting his preparation methods, and now he’s earned the ease.

“I just do it by the feel of it nowadays,” Kraintz says, flattening bumps in the dough with his fingers. “No need to measure it, I know it.”

He slowly rolls the donut cutter over the smoothed dough and pieces of dough pop out from the middle of the formed rings. Kraintz sets the scraps aside so they can be used in a future batch of dough or as donut holes.

“We try not to waste anything,” he says. That includes grinding leftover plain cake and using the crumbs to dust glazed donuts.

Kraintz puts three wire trays, each holding 36 donuts, into a dough proofer, a cabinet with a glass display window that makes yeast rise with low heat and controlled humidity. The formerly flimsy donuts nearly double in size when puffed up properly. Once they rise, Perez drops them in the fryer.

The process moves smoothly as seasoned donut-makers work in harmony, but should a fryer conk out, help from a repair person isn’t easy to come by at 2am.

“We have to be prepared for whatever can go wrong,” O’Donnell says. “The best protection is having two of everything. Two fryers, two mixers, two proofer boxes. If the power goes out while we’re making a batch, we have a generator ready.”

Kraintz speaks while seamlessly cutting and rolling dough and preparing trays for the proof box. A television playing a rock concert sits by his work station.

Kraintz and Perez make 3,600 donuts a day on average.

Some of those donuts find their home in the display cases of Red’s, either in Seaside or their original location on Monterey’s Alvarado Street. But a third of those donuts will go out for delivery. At 1 in the morning, delivery vans – one on weekdays and two on weekends – come to distribute donuts throughout Monterey County to places like Bruno’s Deli in Carmel-by-the-Sea and Acme Coffee Roasting Co. in Seaside.

O’Donnell offers me a fresh glazed donut, warm and wrapped in wax paper. One taste and I’m taken to a previously unknown donut dimension, where the glaze feels like silk and the airy dough gives way like I’m biting through a cloud. Eating it fresh from the fryer seems like a major incentive to spend a career here.

But it’s not as simple as that.

“I’ve made donuts for over 40 years,” O’Donnell says, shaking his head. “I try not to make them as much anymore. The hours are hard and it’s labor intensive back there.”

Outside the store, the Seaside streets sit silently, absent of pedestrians at crosswalks, hours before the roads will rumble with the morning work rush.

From outside, the window glows with the intense kitchen light against the gray night. In that frame Kraintz and Perez morph mountains of dough like artists, faithfully watching over the fryer, meticulously making the treats that will brighten up somebody’s morning.

RED’S DONUTS 1646 Fremont Blvd., Seaside. 4am-3pm Mon-Fri, 4am-2pm Sat, 4am-1pm Sun. 394-3444; 433 Alvarado St., Monterey. 6:30am-12:30pm Sun-Mon, 6:30am-1:30pm Tue-Sat. 372-9761, www.redsdonuts.com.