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Stories of an extraordinary 

worldHow donuts fuelled the American Dream

In Los Angeles, donuts have brought wealth (if not health) to new arrivals. 1843 hits the road in search of the lord of the rings

This piece is from 1843, our sister magazine of ideas, lifestyle and culture. It was published in the August/September 2019 issue.

The most visible donut in Los Angeles floats above the corner of La Cienega and Manchester Boulevards in Inglewood. Thirty-two-and-a-half feet in diameter and painted an unearthly yellow, it is perched on the roof of a single-storey bakery called Randy’s Donuts, where it has captured the attention of motorists since 1954.

Once part of a chain called Big Donut, which had ten outlets across Los Angeles that were famous for their enormous donut signs, Randy’s now serves as a landmark in prime gang territory in South Los Angeles. The giant ring has appeared in dozens of LA rap videos, explains my friend Jeff Weiss, an expert on the local rap scene and a friend of many of its top performers, including Drakeo, who is currently being held in the city’s notoriously decrepit and brutal Men’s Central Jail.

Randy’s is neutral turf in Los Angeles’ bloody gang wars. Neither the Crips nor the Bloods want to gun down somebody’s aunt as she queues for a donut after a 12-hour stand-up shift waiting tables or attending to the sick and dying.

In the rest of America large, centralised donut bakers such as Dunkin’ Donuts and Krispy Kreme hold sway, but neither has successfully penetrated the Los Angeles market. In LA, donuts are local and hand-made. The most famous chain is Winchell’s, which was slyly bought out by its smaller rival, Yum Yum, in 2004. The 126 shops that bake Winchell’s and Yum Yum donuts twice daily onsite in the greater Los Angeles area do battle with dozens of local independent shops, which exist in greater numbers here than in any other American city.

The donuts at Randy’s come in all flavours, including maple, a local favourite. Jeff and I queue there for a dozen rings on a rainy afternoon around rush hour. We take a bite or two of each before throwing the remainder away. Randy’s donuts are heavy, filling and sweet. They’re comfort food for people who work hard and stress-eat to escape, just for a moment, from the police, their children, their neighbours and a city that often treats its citizens like dirt. The donuts give me a feeling of warmth, but they’re not what I came to Los Angeles to discover. I came to LA to find the transcendental donut. If any city might harbour it, it is this one, with its multitude of independent bakeries, each guarding their own secrets.

Donuts can be flavoured, decorated and coated in thousands of ways, but there are really only two basic types: yeast and cake. The division between the tribes of yeast-eaters and cake-eaters is absolute and irreconcilable. Yeast donuts are tangy, chewy and light, and taste something like a cross between sourdough and a croissant. Cake donuts look, feel and taste like cake. I am a yeast-donut person, which means that I think that cake donuts are for babies.

No one truly knows where donuts come from, who first brought them to California or why they remain so popular here. But you can always find a donut shop in LA, no matter which exit you take off the freeway. Donuts are the soul food of a place that is often accused of lacking a soul. They are the sticky, messy, waist-expanding ying to the yang of Southern California’s sun-kissed beaches and taut-and-tanned infatuation with wellness. They are the fruit of thousands of freeway entrance-ramp deep-fryers, eaten on the run by late-shift junkies and early risers with one hand on the steering wheel. Put your eye to the hole in a donut and you might glimpse the answer to the mystery of how Los Angeles continues to cohere, even as the languages and cultures of Angelinos multiply.

As bad as things can get for the poor, Los Angeles still invites the world to dream. Everyone here came from someplace else, pushing forward while struggling to survive. Donuts offer a key to understanding the city because each wave of newcomers has made them – Okies from the American interior in the 1930s and 1940s, Vietnamese and Laotians in the 1970s and 1980s, and, to the present day, incomers from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador. The recipe is simple. The basic ingredients – yeast, milk, flour and sugar – are mixed and then quick-fried in oil. Months of long, hot, stressful labour in donut shops turn migrants into Americans who, in their turn, modify the idea of America that is passed on to the next generation of strivers. Opening a donut shop is an affirmation of the belief that anyone can become an American, no matter where they come from or what language they speak.

One reason for the enduring power of donuts is their simplicity. They are easy to make; everyone likes them. Many cuisines around the world have a place for sweet, fried dough. Perhaps that explains why immigrants to Los Angeles have gravitated towards making and selling them. Donuts represent an achievable, straightforward path to an American life into which one can assimilate and from which one can profit. The donut embodies the ideal of a unified nation, even in partisan times when Trumpists declare immigrants to be criminals, and progressives often portray America itself as a historically, and perhaps inherently, racist enterprise.

So I set off to eat my way into the heart of the nation. I sampled delicious yeast donuts at Dad’s Donuts in Burbank and enjoyed a superior chocolate cake donut at Daily Donuts.

Jeff and I finished our night at Stan’s in Westwood. I ate my first LA donut there when I was 21 years old, and they still tasted just as good, with the same yeasty sour-sweetness in the kicker. When I had my first Stan’s donut, I was compelled to admit to myself that LA wasn’t simply the place of emptiness and anomie that New Yorkers like myself, raised on Woody Allen movies, imagined it to be. There were palm trees here and the swimming pool in my host’s backyard had a narcotic effect after a long day of doing nothing. It made sense that generations of New Yorkers had traded in cold winters and bagels for a place where people dressed for summer all year long and fresh-baked donuts were available on nearly every corner. It was hard to imagine that the week-old packages of Entenmann’s donuts I had bought from deli shelves in New York were in any way the same species of food.

I was happy to be back at Stan’s, but there were worrying signs. It was 9.30pm and the donuts still tasted fresh, but no one was buying them. We were the only people there. Jeff also pointed out that the store was half of its former size, and that the rest of the site was occupied by a take-out joint serving tofu and wok-fried vegetables. Was LA’s donut culture losing ground? If so, the idea of America itself might be in danger.

Frank Watase is living proof of the power of donuts to make American dreams come true. As a Japanese-American, he was brought up an outsider in his own country. Watase was born in a small fishing village called Hanapepe on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, just after the first world war. The path he took to donut heaven was not a predictable one. His studies at the University of Hawaii were interrupted on December 7th 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour. After that, the university was closed down. Japanese-Americans became objects of suspicion, then legal sanction, and Watase was expelled from an officer-training course. He became a construction manager instead, building housing for American soldiers. After the war, he went to Harvard Business School where his studies were interrupted again, this time by the Korean war. He served as an officer in a front-line combat unit, before returning to Harvard and eventually graduating. Then he went back to Hawaii to run a construction business. It went bust.

He moved his family to Southern California where he answered a newspaper ad for a business manager. The ad had been placed by Phil Holland, who had recently opened a donut store. Holland then started two more shops. He later gave Watase an ownership stake before retiring from the business altogether. Watase expanded the new chain, called Yum Yum, and eventually merged it with Winchell’s, the industry leader, to create LA’s largest donut empire.

Aged 95, Frank Watase still arrives for work at the Winchell’s headquarters every day by 8am, though his son, Lincoln Watase, now runs the business. After attempting conversation with Frank for a minute, I ask if he knows where donuts came from. He pretends to be deaf. Then he insists that he might say the wrong thing. When I remark that he doesn’t look bad for a man of his age, he gestures to the Zimmer frame by his desk and shrugs.

For a moment, I feel sorry for him. Then I recognise something in his eyes that is familiar to me from a lifetime of playing poker. As I glance at the wall behind his desk, I see a photograph of the old man, taken only a few months ago. He is standing with a shovel in his hand, breaking ground for a new Winchell’s franchise. “You look pretty good in the photograph over there,” I suggest. He looks back at me.

“Oh,” he answers mildly. “I have good days and bad days.”

Now that the preliminaries are over, he begins to expound. Donuts have their distinctive ring shape because it exposes the maximum surface area to heat. With a bar-shaped cake, it’s much harder to get the inside to cook evenly. But I’m after something more than baking tips. He listens to my question with a serious expression, then pauses for at least half a minute before he answers.

“The question of where the donut comes from is the biggest mystery. There is very little written about it. Almost nothing,” he begins. “I used to question the manufacturers of shortening, flour and sugar. I asked them: what makes it taste good? What makes it look good? Where does it come from?”

When I ask him if he ever found out the answer, he smiles at me, the way a card sharp smiles at a mark. “I found in a book once, that when the Pilgrims, the early settlers, came here, before it was even America, they made donuts,” he answers. He claims to have forgotten the title of the book but remembers the story exactly: “They brought them with them on their boats.” When I suggest that the donuts must have been horribly stale, he explains that the first donuts were actually a kind of hard biscuit. “Donuts”, he declares with finality, “were the very first American food.”

Lincoln Watase remembers the day that his father got into the donut business. “He comes home wearing all white, and he’s got this big bag of day-old donuts, like a trash bag.” Even after Frank found work, the family were the poorest in their middle-class neighbourhood of Torrance, with garage-sale furniture and hand-me-down clothes. But with every year of hard work in the donut shops, the family Christmas tree got bigger.

When I suggest that his experience was like that of many families who emigrated from Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s and 1980s and went on to run Winchell’s stores, Lincoln Watase demurs. There was a divide between his father’s job and his home life, he says: as a child, he was obliged to concentrate on his schoolwork and never spent late nights baking donuts. Nonetheless, he sometimes worked in the stores after school. He remembers lifting the heavy bags of donut mix, and chasing away drifters and vagrants, and the fear that the next person who walked in might be holding a gun. He knows from his own experience how physically punishing and exhausting the business can be. “It’s very demanding and the pay’s not great,” he says. “I have a strong appreciation for the folks that are working in the stores.”

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