Donuts and Hot Cheetos (An LA Story)
Donut box portraits and an entire exhibition dedicated to contemporary food-art
Welcome to the latest issue of Weekly Special, a food-art newsletter by Andrea Gyorody.
Happy Easter, Chag Sameach, and Ramadan Mubarak!
Before we get to the meat of this week’s issue (which is quite carb-focused, actually), a holiday note about refugee relief:
For me, Passover’s celebration of liberation from enslavement is always inflected by the suffering happening in the world. None of us is free until all of us are free. I’ve previously shared a donation link for José Andrés’s amazing organization World Central Kitchen, which is feeding Ukrainian refugees at the border in neighboring countries, but I also want you to know about Miry’s List, a California-based non-profit helping to resettle refugees in the US. They work primarily with newcomers from the Middle East, assembling lists of supplies that you can purchase and send directly to a refugee family, and they’ve also launched a spice kit to raise funds for ongoing aid.
I first read about Miry’s List in Evan Kleiman’s Good Food newsletter (which also sold me on watching Set!) and immediately signed up for their mailing list. Now I get regular messages in my inbox filled with opportunities to give in a modest but meaningful way. I can’t change the big and overwhelming ugliness of this world, but I can send an uprooted family a few things that will help make their new life in this country a good one.
That’s as solid a segue as any to this week’s issue, which begins with a peek at an exhibition that celebrates the Cambodian refugees who turned LA into the donut capital that it is today.
Now let’s dig in!
Donuts and Hot Cheetos
Phung Huynh @ Self Help Graphics & Art
Lots of people associate Los Angeles (for better or worse) with green juice and yoga. They’re not wrong, but LA is also home to an absurdly large number of excellent donut shops, dotting strip malls all over the city and its suburbs. I’m not talking Dunkin’ and Krispy — I’m talking locally owned mom-and-pop shops, the vast majority of which were established by Cambodian refugees who came to America in the late 1970s, escaping the brutal Khmer Rouge.
The unbelievable story of how so many donut shops came to be owned by Cambodians starts with Ted Ngoy, who arrived in the US in 1975. After a stint at Winchell’s, Ngoy took over a shop in La Habra called Christy’s and quickly built a donut empire across LA and Orange Counties, employing fellow refugees and eventually sponsoring visas for over 100 Cambodian families. Ngoy is also responsible for the popularization of pink donut boxes, which he first used simply because they were cheaper and, in a standard size, happened to perfectly contain a dozen donuts.
The iconic pink box forms the central motif in Phung Huynh’s current exhibition, Donut (W)hole, at the non-profit printmaking space Self Help Graphics & Art. Huynh, whose Chinese Cambodian father fled for Vietnam and eventually settled in the US, grew up around “donut kids” and their families. To pay homage to this rich heritage, Huynh worked with the collective Pink Box Stories to pair first-person accounts of the donut kid experience with portraits of those kids as adults, some of whom have inherited their family bakeries. Their narratives speak to the centrality of the donut shop in their childhood memories. Michelle Sou, whose parents owned Olympic Donuts #11 in East LA, recounted:
The donut shop has always been more than our livelihood — it is where our lives happened. Where most summer afternoons were spent. Where we returned from family weddings and birthday parties at the end of the night. For some years, where we had Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. It’s more of a childhood home than the actual home we’ve lived in since I was a toddler, as my parents purchased the shop when they got married over 30 years ago.
Donut (W)hole features a series of silkscreened prints that Huynh produced at Self-Help (which layer contemporary cartoon portraits over family photos), but the most luminous works in the show are Huynh’s earlier graphite drawings, rendered on flattened pink donut boxes. She has a deft hand, and an approach to portraiture that exudes a sense of care and tenderness toward her subjects — something that comes, at least in part, from her closeness to their shared lived experiences.
Donut (Whole) is on view at Self Help Graphics & Art (1300 East 1st St., Los Angeles) through May 27.
Potluck @ Hashimoto Contemporary
It’s impossible to summarize the wild variety of work included in Potluck, an exhibition curated by Dasha Matsuura for Hashimoto Contemporary, so instead I’m going to highlight a few standouts from this veritable parade of wacky and playful art about food.
WE STAN HOT CHEETOS
BEST ANTS SINCE DALÍ 🐜
SLEEPIEST LITTLE SNACK TRAY
MELON-A DENTATA + A LOTTA LOBSTER
KATIE BUTLER FABULOUSNESS! (READ MORE HERE)
HOT GIRL SUMMER: WHERE SARDINES ARE THE NEW S’MORES
Potluck was on view at Hashimoto Contemporary (2754 S La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles) from Feb. 12 – Mar. 5, 2022.
For Further Eating
Reading so much about Cambodian-owned donut shops recently meant exactly one thing: I had to get my hands on some fried treats. I hit up SK’s Donuts, located walking distance from my old studio apartment in Miracle Mile, with wafting smells of burnt sugar and maple that used to entice me frequently no matter the time of day.
Welcome to the hardest decision of my weekend: which dones to buy of the many many varieties calling my name. After much deliberation and second-guessing, I settled on a strawberry-and-pastry-cream “SKronut” (sounds vulgar, but maybe that’s the charm?), an apple fritter, a blueberry cream cheese cake donut, and a red velvet for the husband.
It’s been a while since I had a bad donut (a sad, dry specimen, somewhere in the Midwest), and surely anything covered in frosting or glaze is bound to be delicious, but these were exceptional. My husband ate the red velvet in what appeared to be one bite; I savored the SKronut — which was flaky and crisp, despite the day’s humidity — while I watched Julia on HBO; and when my preschooler woke from his nap and received the bites of apple fritter he was promised, he made some unidentifiable grunting noises and then loudly exclaimed “Mmmm!!!! This is GOOD!!!” I saved the blueberry for the following day, making for an especially nice donut-and-tea break on a dreary Monday.
That’s all to say: we’ll be back, SK’s.
Thank you for reading!
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You’re the best. See you again soon!
I saw that Stephen Morrison installation in New York (I think) and it was delightful!!