Strawberry Cake Donut, Daylight Donuts - Tuscaloosa, Alabama
I love the color pink. I especially love the color I've learned to know as millennial pink--the color of Pepto-Bismol, of Instagram influencer tones, of the Sicilian soccer club Palermo. Flamingos. The cover of that one Modest Mouse album. Ariana Grande sweatshirts.
The color pink is also synonymous with donuts. In its cartoon form, most donuts have a pink frosting, complete with brightly colored sprinkles. When we picture Homer Simpson eating a donut, it has pink frosting. Most places offer a strawberry frosted donut--every time I go to a new place, I usually get a strawberry frosted despite not really being a fan of fake strawberry flavor; as a kid I found myself much more attracted to cherry-flavored things, and therefore I felt as if strawberry felt a little bit disappointing. I would grab a red lollipop hoping for it to taste like one of those Luden's Throat Drops, and instead, I would have the sharpness of the strawberry & feel let down. Some artificial flavors just feel a bit more artificial than others, though I am never one to talk, as I tend to embrace a lot of "fake" flavors. I was overly excited when I found out that the Tastykakes Butterscotch Krimpets snack cake of my youth found its way to my local Target, despite it being a regional delicacy for most of my life. The best bing cherry tastes nothing like, say, a Cherry Italian Ice, but if you were to offer me a handful of Bings or an Icee from the Chevron down the street, I'm going with the striped cup with the polar bear every time.
However, the main reason why donuts & the color pink are so linked is because of the boxes. Donut boxes, of course, come in a multitude of colors; many of them are plain white with some various accents: Krispy Kreme with their fantastic green polka dots, Dunkin' with their iconic orange and magenta logo, the "You Deserve A Donut" box with its coffee sunburst, a local bakery with their logo rubber stamped on top. But a white box can mean any baked good could be inside: a shoofly pie, for instance, or a quarter of a sheet cake. When you see a pink box, whether it is out on the street or in a film or a television show, it is a signal that its contents are filled with fried dough. It is unmistakable and undeniable.
The pink donut box has a name: the 9-9-4. As for its rise, we have Ted Ngoy, a Cambodian refugee to thank. Ngoy fled the Khmer Rouge in the mid-70s, and eventually settled in Southern California. After arriving in the States, he held several part-time jobs, including working at a gas station. One night, a co-worker ducked out to bring back donuts and coffee for the crew, and Ngoy fell in love with the pastry, without even knowing what it was. The following day, he rode his bicycle to the donut shop and offered to purchase the shop with the small amount of money he had raised. The workers essentially laughed him out of the building. The next day, he came across a Winchell's Donuts--a regional chain popular in Southern California, and presented them with the same offer. The company was in the midst of an affirmative action program to increase minority hiring, and so he was hired on the spot. He worked his way through the program to manager of the store, before raising enough money to purchase a small donut shop called Christy's, located in La Habra, which had become a landing place for Cambodian refugees. Ngoy eventually was able to open up over 50 Christy's locations, staffing them with hundreds of Cambodian refugees whose visas he sponsored. While his empire eventually crumbled (Ngoy became a notorious gambler, losing the majority of his fortune in Las Vegas, before returning to Cambodia to try to become a conservative politician supported by the Bush Family, losing even more of his money, and winding up bankrupt), Cambodian-Americans are synonymous with owning donut shops, to the extent that 80% of independent donut shops in Los Angeles are run by Cambodian-Americans.
In the 1970s, the owner of one of these independent shops asked their manufacturing distributor if there were cheaper options than the traditional white pastry box that was currently being used. Westco, the distributor, had thousands of pieces of leftover pink cardboard stock, and created the 9-9-4 (9 inches, by 9 inches, by 4 inches), and sold the boxes to the stores at a discount. The owner claimed to have wanted a red box, as red is lucky in Chinese/Cambodian culture, but settled for pink.
Last month, I traveled to Portland, Oregon for the AWP Writer's Conference. Portland is known as a donut paradise--when walking from the train station to our hotel, I took note of various donut caricatures adorning the sides of buildings and The Oregonian newspaper street racks. Being known as a donut-obsessive, I had a very long list of recommendations. My friend Alvin, who is from the area, gave me by far the best list: one of the best donuts I've ever had in my life was from the Rocking Frog Cafe, who made simple cake donuts to order--I had legit thought that they had forgotten about me, but they were simply frying the dough and rolling it in cinnamon and sugar. Rocking Frog has a great origin story too: apparently, they used to be a stand-alone shack called Moody's, before the health department demanded that they be a part of an existing business, and so they were absorbed into a cute little coffeeshop. Delicious Donuts, a family owned shop close to the Convention Center had a great variety of donuts and toed the line beautifully between "wacky" and "no-frills", and would certainly be my every weekend shop if I lived in the area.
(My trip to Blue Star will be saved for another essay. Spoiler Alert: Not great.)
However, the majority of my Portland Donut recommendations revolved around one place: Voodoo Doughnuts. Established in Portland, Oregon in the 1980s by Cat Daddy Pogson and Tres Shannon, Voodoo is by far the most well-known of all of the donut places in the Pacific Northwest. They've inspired a brewing collaboration with Rogue Ales. They've been on the Travel Channel and The Food Network more times than one can count. They've expanded outside of Oregon to California, Austin, and Orlando, famously opening in the Universal Studios theme park.
This is where I tell you that I didn't go to Voodoo.
One might think that I am "too cool" for Voodoo--that this is a place that donut amateurs get excited about, but *true* donut aficionados like myself avoid altogether. That I'm not here to fall for gimmicks of fruity pebble donuts, or bubble gum dust, or Tang. The truth is, while I will always go for the simpler donut, I still am very curious about donut wackiness--Captain Crunch! Cayenne Pepper! in hopes that maybe this will be the donut that manages to get the bombast correctly.
I didn't go to Voodoo because I balked at their appropriation of Voodoo culture--most notably their Voodoo Doll donut, which is straight-up donut in blackface; complete with dark frosting and exaggerated red lips and a pretzel "needle" driven through its heart. Before leaving for Oregon, I was joking around with friends about how I wasn't prepared for the "Caucacity" of the place: between Oregon's history of Black Exclusion laws & as Oregon black history expert Walidah Imarisha states, "Portland's perfection of neoliberalism," my white guilt sirens were radiating from my core. I felt like Voodoo perfectly captured my anxiety: perpetrating a stereotype in a situation where they really should know better, but laughing it off as "just a donut" & that it is all meant in good fun. Furthermore, after spending almost fifteen years in the American South, I've learned that it is not a good idea to mess with any type of spiritual folkways & I am not about to chance fate.
What I didn't realize in all of this that they also lifted something else for their own advancement: the pink box. “We own the brand, and we have 30-something trademarks,” says Cat Daddy. “The sign is copyrighted, the name, the box, the phrase ‘good things come in pink boxes’; everything."
On Voodoo Doughnuts' About Us page, they talk briefly about their success story:
There was only one problem, neither Cat Daddy nor Tres had ever made a doughnut before! They set out for the sunny Los Angeles suburb of Pico Rivera, California, where they met up with some doughnut masters, and learned about doughnuts from the ground up. These old, grizzled doughnut veterans knew what they were doing and were barely willing to give up their trade secrets at first.
But the charm and good looks of our Portland heroes eventually won over the doughnut masters, and the secrets were revealed to them. Learning when to throw the flour, proper handling of a rolling pin, the intricacies of an old fashion, the “flip,” and countless other tricks of the trade were now in the hands, minds, and notebooks of Cat Daddy and Tres.
Pico Rivera: less than ten miles from Ted Ngoy's first donut shop.
Pico Rivera: home of Westco Distribution, who inadvertently started the pink box craze in the first place.
As a result, the pink donut box makes us think of Voodoo Donuts more so than of the mom & pop's independent shops. Their expansion, their appearances on bombastic food travel shows, and their embrace of "weird quirkiness" have woven their own narrative. Marketing researchers have lauded their approach to branding, especially their "iconic" pink boxes. Donut shops that use pink boxes are automatically compared to Voodoo--while in Portland, I stopped at Coco Donuts, who also use a pink box. Most people I ran into assumed that I had went to Voodoo--the brand is that powerful.
Upon returning to Tuscaloosa, I took a drive to my favorite donut place in town. It's a little bit out of the way & towards nowhere--a small donut outpost at the end of a Publix strip mall on the way to the Black Belt. Daylight Donuts is a chain that originated in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Every donut shop is independently owned and operated: Daylight Donuts is technically a flour company. As a result, the preparation of the donuts, as well as the flavors in each Daylight can vary greatly. The Daylight Donuts in South Tuscaloosa uses fresh fruit in their batter and frosts each donut to order. Their strawberry donut is my favorite donut in town--sweet enough to take away the sharpness, but the fruit flavor shines through in this perfect mixture of real and artificial. I've ordered their donuts in bulk for poetry readings. I had their cinnamon sugar donuts for my wedding party as we were all getting ready for the day.
One Saturday in January, I go into the store to get my customary dozen. Vandy, the owner, is wearing a Tom Brady New England Patriots jersey. I ask him about the jersey and how he became a fan of the team. He tells me that when his family came over from Cambodia, many of them settled in Massachusetts. He went to college there for a few years, before moving South to Tuscaloosa and opened his own donut shop, telling me that he always wanted to own his own business. Donuts were just a natural choice.
Every visit, Vandy or his wife Volak throw in a few extra donut holes into the box for me. Half of them don't make the ten minute drive back to my house. I return home, coffee in one hand, as I balance the bright yellow box on my forearm, as I try to open the door from the garage. Each strawberry donut varies in color--some donuts are paler than others. Yet in each bite there are at least a few flecks of bright red strawberry, the fruit's tartness and color seeping out into the dough to dye it a pale pink--each bite a reminder of something unquestionably real.