A legacy built on yumminess

A baker at Lafeen’s cuts out the dough for the classic donut and puts them on the rack. After the baker cuts out the dough, it is then baked and deep-fried in cooking oil. — photo by Lillian Furlong

Friday, June 04, 2010
By Andrea Farrell
The Western Front (Washington State, USA)

There is nothing quite like the smell of fresh doughnuts: sweet rising dough, sugary glazes and, of course, the grease in the fryer as it bubbles away.

All of these smells drift through the air inside Lafeen’s Donuts & Ice Cream. Lafeen’s, located on Electric Avenue near Whatcom Falls Park, has been serving doughnuts to Bellingham residents for almost 27 years.

More important than the smell, however, is the taste.

“Oh, my gosh, they are the best doughnuts in the state,” customer Aaron Brown said.

Other loyal patrons agree. Manager Shawn Samuth said the company doesn’t have a website and rarely advertises.

Instead, the business relies on word of mouth to find new customers.

Lafeen’s is open between 6 a.m. and 10:45 p.m., but those in the know will say the evening is the best time for a warm, fresh doughnut.

Fryer and glazer William Born said he isn’t sure why Samuth decided to start making doughnuts at night instead of the early morning.

“I think my boss just got old,” Born said.

Samuth and his brother have owned and operated Lafeen’s for 14 years. Samuth said he enjoys running a business.

“I like it because you get to work for yourself,” he said. “You have the freedom to run the business the way you see fit, and to put your own ideas into it.”

Freedom is a familiar concept to Samuth. He and his family immigrated to the United States from Cambodia in 1976. He said they fled to escape the Khmer Rouge, the totalitarian regime that caused the deaths of approximately two million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979.

Samuth was 16 years old when he and his family took everything they could carry and left Cambodia. They hiked through the Dângrêk Mountains for five days and nights, finally arriving at a refugee camp in Thailand.

Samuth said it was frightening to be pursued through the mountains by government soldiers.

“My cousin’s family had a baby and we were worried he would cry,” he said. “But I carried him and he didn’t cry at all.”

In Thailand, Samuth’s father found work in the Thai army, which helped sponsor him to bring his family to the United States. Samuth became an American citizen in 1983.

Now, Samuth enjoys tinkering with new flavors and styles of doughnuts.

Since acquiring Lafeen’s in 1996, he has added the raspberry fritter, a selection of cake doughnuts and the popular buttermilk bar. The shop now boasts 75 different types of donuts, Samuth said.

Another recent addition is Wi-Fi Internet, meant to attract college students and professionals who want to get out of the house or office while staying connected.

Whatcom Community College freshman Phil Tatman said he usually takes advantage of the WiFi, sitting with his laptop and a doughnut.

Tatman said that when he first moved to the area, he came into Lafeen’s every day. He ate so many doughnuts that he got sick of them and had to take a break.

He now comes just twice a week. Still, he can’t get enough of the doughnuts.

“When you have a buttermilk bar or a French crueller hot and fresh, you are spoiled,” he said. Going back to old, cold, stale doughnuts just isn’t possible after you’ve tried Lafeen’s, he said.

Tatman said the shop is popular with families and stoned people with the munchies. One reviewer on Yelp.com wrote that Lafeen’s is a common ground and unspoken neutral zone for stoners, drunks, students and cops.

Tatman said he also visits Lafeen’s for the service.

“Once, I got a fritter straight out of the fryer,” Tatman said. “I asked, ‘Are there any chocolate ready?’ and they turned around, dipped it into the chocolate and handed it back to me.”

NUTS for doughnuts

The 1,500 to 2,000 doughnuts made fresh each day at K-May Donuts & Coffee House on Sixth Avenue Southeast include those dipped in chocolate, caramel, vanilla or maple and some topped with nuts or sprinkles. (Daily photos by John Godbey)

Cambodian native opens shop in Decatur, continuing hardworking family tradition

4/28/10
By Patrice Stewart
Staff Writer
Decatur Daily (Alabama, USA)

The early riser gets the biggest selection when K-May Donuts & Coffee House opens at 4:30 a.m.

Cambodian native Chy Khoun comes to work at 2 a.m. to start making the glazed, cream-filled, cake and many other types of doughnuts for the month-old business at 1815 Sixth Ave. S.E., across from Gateway Shopping Center.

“I’ve done doughnuts most of my life,” said Khoun, 53, who starts with a mix and adds water and yeast. He has lived in the United States for about 20 years and previously ran doughnut shops in California, Arizona, Arkansas and Mississippi.

“There are about 4,000 doughnut stores in California owned by Cambodians,” he said. “We don’t have other skills, so we do this — and I’m used to working 14 to 18 hours a day.”

He was in high school in the late 1970s when the Communists came and closed the schools and banks, and he was sent to work in the fields and on road construction. They worked hard, with little food, medicine or money, he recalled.

“I still think about that two or three times a week and wonder why they did that,” Khoun said.

“Things were bad, and when I left Cambodia, I had to walk 150 miles to Thailand. After I escaped, I stayed in a refugee camp in Thailand for five or six years. But I am a lucky one.”

About 2 million Cambodians were executed for political reasons or died from starvation or forced labor during a four-year period.

When someone wanted to purchase Khoun’s shop in Batesville, Miss., he drove around to look for his next location and discovered Decatur, where he didn’t know anyone.

He named his shop K-May for Khmer, or the nationality of the Cambodian people.

His wife helps him make doughnuts, and his brother Chhanarith, who moved from Massachusetts, assists with customers.

“I like the river here, because I like to fish,” Khoun said. “I like this town, and the weather is about like Cambodia. I’m tired of big towns now.”

He is also planning to open a doughnut shop in Cullman in May.

The 1,500 to 2,000 doughnuts he estimates he makes every day includes those made with yeast and then glazed or dipped in chocolate, caramel, vanilla or maple. The doughnut holes, an offshoot, often sell out quickly, as do the Long Johns and styles filled with vanilla, chocolate and various fruity creams.

Customers have a hard time choosing from the wide assortment, which also includes pineapple fritters and apple fritters, bear claws, cinnamon twists and cake doughnuts made with sour cream, buttermilk, blueberries or chocolate.

Along with doughnuts and various coffee beverages, they prepare breakfast any time.

“Mornings are busy, and a lot of people are getting omelets, two eggs over easy or breakfast burritos,” he said.

They finish preparing trays of doughnuts at 10 a.m. and then until 2 p.m., they make sandwiches such as Chicken Montana with grilled chicken, onion, bell pepper, mushrooms and melted cheese.

“A lot of people like our sandwiches, because they are different,” Khoun said.

The doughnut shop is open from 4:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays.

Doughnut wars in Abilene

February 20, 2010
By Jaime Adame
Abilene Biz (Texas, USA)

About a week after arriving in the United States, Steve Lao was making doughnuts.

Lao, a native of Cambodia who endured the brutal regime led by Pol Pot, came to California in 1989 at age 29, where “my friend, he had a doughnut shop,” he said.

Choong Park of Korean ancestry got into doughnuts more recently, learning from his brother, who has owned a doughnut shop in Wichita Falls for about three years.

Both men recently have joined the seemingly crowded field of doughnut shop operators in Abilene, bringing the number of doughnut shops in Abilene to nine, according to business listings. There is the Jack ‘N’ Jill chain, as well as two A.M. Donut Shops (which also have Cambodian owners).

Park and his wife, Mi, own Dandy Donuts at 2549 S. 1st St., near Ross Avenue. Both are quick to smile and laugh with customers, and Choong Park has put his construction skills to good use, building a wooden deck he hopes will become a popular spot for outside diners when warmer weather arrives.

Lao, 51, runs Donut Time with his business partner, Kim An Om, at South Willis and South 27th streets, the former location of The Donut Palace. He speaks proudly and knowledgeably about his craft, and said he insists on making things “fair” for his customers, offering mix-and-match deals when a dozen items are ordered.

The men come to Abilene not without making sacrifices. Choong Park’s four children reside in Flower Mound, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, though his wife is temporarily in Abilene. The children range in age from 8 to 19, and he said his mother is looking after the youngest.

Lao has a wife and two children, ages 9 and 11, in California. He hopes to visit in May or June.

Each cite the influences of their fellow expatriates in getting into the doughnut business.

Lao estimated that as many as 90 percent of the doughnut shops in California are Cambodian-run.

“No. 1, we have no education,” said Lao matter-of-factly, explaining the state of refugees who came to the United States around the time he did. But Lao said they arrived with a strong work ethic needed to succeed in a demanding business that requires long hours.

Choong Park said Koreans dominate the doughnut business in the Dallas area. When asked why, he talked about the early start to the workday.

“They don’t mind. They work hard,” Choong Park said. “It’s not easy.”

EARLY DAYS

“I can wake up early, but this is way too early,” said Park with a laugh. Each day, Park said he gets to work at about 2 a.m. or earlier to prepare that day’s batch of doughnuts.

It’s just part of the doughnut business, and both men do the baking seven days a week.

Lao’s shop opens at 5 a.m. and closes at 5 p.m., making for workdays that stretch to 15 or 16 hours, he said.

Choong Park’s shop also opens at 5 a.m., though by 1 p.m. he usually shuts things down. But with plenty of dining space in a building that formerly was a restaurant, he said he’s thinking of perhaps adding lunch items to expand his offerings.

Choong Park, 50, said he came to the United States about 30 years ago from South Korea, hoping for a better life.

He lived in Abilene for about seven years before moving away in 2004, he said. He worked mostly construction jobs. With the help of contractors, he has completely remodeled the 3,000-square foot former restaurant.

It has a sun-drenched seating area, with new floors and fresh red-and-yellow paint job that adds to the bright setting. There also is a touch of art — Park’s 17-year-old daughter Dawn contributed a skilled painting of two doughnuts frosted with pink icing and blue swirls. The impressionistic work on canvas adds to the décor, along with flowers placed on the mantle of a former fireplace, which may be recognizable to many older Abilenians who remember when the building housed the very first Taco Bueno restaurant.

Dandy Donuts opened Dec. 15.

Park said he owned a store in the Dallas area, but was encouraged to enter the doughnut business by people from his church.

After training with others and spending time learning from his brother, Choong Park said he sought out Abilene in part for the lower real estate prices, but also because he enjoyed his time in the town.

He and his wife made the investment in the building and the remodeling work, and now they are working to develop their business.

“It takes time to settle down,” said Choong Park. “Every day, it’s getting better.”

HELPING A FRIEND

For Lao, he has about 15 years of experience owning his own doughnut shop. He said he’s bought and sold several in that time in Southern California, training nephews to take over.

He has one California shop remaining open, which his wife is managing.

Lao said Donut Time is an investment, but also a way to help out Om, an old friend from when the two battled starvation during the repressive, violent crackdowns in their region.

Lao was forced into hiding, but said he could rely on the generosity of Om, who came to the United States in 1992.

“You don’t have any food to eat,” said Lao, recalling his struggles before coming to the United States as a refugee. “She gave her share,” he said, explaining “that’s why I came to help her here.”

Now, Lao is helping train Om and her son to learn the doughnut trade. He talks about the importance of making doughnuts in the “California” style, which he describes as bigger and fluffier than what he has seen in Texas.

The bell clangs at Donut Time, which opened Jan. 1, and Lao talks to customers pulling up to make an order. Drive-through orders are the most common at his shop.

There is a decent-sized seating area, but his shop is dominated by the large front counter.

In Abilene, Lao said he likes the friendly customers. Driving around, he said he’s also pleased by the lack of graffiti. He said he is considering moving his family from California to Abilene, but said he doesn’t know what the future holds.

OPTIMISM

Park wants to open a drive-through operation, but he has had to rely on help from his wife, Mi, after his nephew left the shop, unable to handle the early hours, Park said.

Until he figures out how to get more help, his shop will be walk-in only.

Both men offer more than doughnuts, however. Lao sells kolaches and breakfast burritos. Park also sells sausage rolls, and makes a habit of giving away his unsold merchandise to local charities like Love & Care Ministries.

“It is helpful,” said Terry Davis, director of ministries for the organization, which offers breakfast meals for the needy.

Whatever the competition, Park and Lao are optimistic about their businesses, though Lao said the economy undoubtedly has hurt sales in his California shop.

Still, not many places offer something you can buy for less than a dollar, Choong Park said.

“It’s convenient,” he said.

For customers, maybe. For the early risers behind the counter, not so much.

Cambodian couple finds new home for 41st Donut House

09/22/2009
By JONDI GUMZ
Santa Cruz Sentinel (California, USA)

41ST AVE DONUT HOUSE
WHAT: Doughnuts, 75 cents each, $8 per dozen; Farmers Brothers coffee, small, $1, medium, $1.25, large, $1.50.
OWNER: Keang Siv Lim and Hour Chiv
LOCATION: 1601Q 41st Ave., Capitola, King's Plaza shopping center
HOURS: 5 a.m. to 4 p.m. seven days a week.
INFORMATION: 464-9599

CAPITOLA -- It cost a lot of dough -- close to $100,000 -- to move the 41st Ave. Donut House across the street.

Keang Siv Lim and Hour Chiv, who have been in the doughnut business locally for 23 years, discovered the exhaust hood and fan would not fit through the door of their new smaller location in the King's Plaza shopping center.

That didn't stop them.

They paid a contractor to cut a hole in the roof and use a crane to set the equipment in place. When they opened for business Monday morning, they were all smiles.

"First day," said Lim, handing over a doughnut and coffee to Marshall Jones, who lives nearby.

Jones, 68, admitted, "I'm a doughnut lover."

Lim, 61, and her husband Chiv, 62, are Cambodian natives of Chinese descent. They lived near the Thai border and made a living selling merchandise at a local marketplace until their country was taken over in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge.

They lost everything.

When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979 and fought off the Khmer Rouge, the couple escaped and spent two years in a refugee camp in Thailand. After another six months in a refugee camp in the Philippines, Lim and her husband, their five children, including one born in the refugee camp, and Lim's mother were allowed to resettle in the United States.

They arrived in November 1982.

The couple found work at a garment factory in Los Angeles, then in 1986 got an opportunity in Santa Cruz.

Cambodian who had purchased Ferrell's Donuts on Mission Street offered them jobs.

Lim took care of customers at the counter; her husband made the doughnuts, a job for early risers.

They learned the business, and in 1989, bought the shop. Two years later, they bought another doughnut shop on Ocean Street in Santa Cruz and changed the name to Ferrell's.

Their friend Yong Sip said most of the doughnut shops locally are owned by Cambodians.

That is true across California, according to Henry Chen, who married Lim and Chiv's second oldest daughter, Lena.

"When we first arrived, we were very hungry for the opportunity to succeed and bring about a better life for ourselves and our families," Chen said. "Most of us knew very little English."

For that reason, the seven-day-a-week doughnut business was a very good fit.

In the mid-1980s, it was not uncommon to find a Cambodian baker working in a doughnut shop at night, training four or five of his friends, Chen recalled. Most of these friends went on to become bakers themselves, and they in turn taught others.

Chen, for example, has a doughnut shop in Alameda.

He also has an expresso shop in Pacifica, managed by the youngest of Lim and Chiv's children, who was born in America.

That's another family tradition: Having the children help out at the doughnut shop.

After the children were on their own, Lim and Chiv downsized, selling the two Santa Cruz shops and buying 41st Ave Donut.

When Goodwill bought the shopping center where they were located for the Shoreline cosmetology school, they were not ready to retire.

They found space at the Kings Plaza shopping center owned by the Ow family.

Patriarch George Ow Jr., whose father immigrated to America at 16, is impressed by their resilience.

"They are grandparents and still working longer and harder than most 20- to 30-year-olds," he said. "Definitely the American work ethic."

Doughnuts and Barbecue

Talaya Sin and and Ben Hamamoto. (Photo: Ling Ma)

How one Asian American Studies major is taking back the mom-and-pop doughnut shop, one Cambodian barbecue cookout at a time.

December 24, 2008
By Ling Ma
East Bay Express (California, USA)

When Talaya Sin met with the landlord of Allstar Donuts to negotiate taking over the lease of the small, troubled doughnut shop on University Avenue in Berkeley, she didn't expect she'd be running the business within twenty minutes. At the end of the meeting, the landlord turned to the previous owner working behind the counter and said, "OK, you can go home now." A shocked Sin started learning the cash register on the spot.

The decision to run a doughnut shop was more complex than this brief business meeting might suggest. Growing up as part of a Cambodian immigrant family in West Oakland, Sin had certainly seen other family members making a living in the business. But laboring in the family business wasn't necessarily anything that Sin had intended for herself. After all, the childhood transplant to the United States had double-majored in Asian American Studies and Psychobiology at UC Davis, later followed by a stint working as post-production translator at Farallon Films. There, she worked with filmmaker Steven Okazaki on The Conscience of Nhem En, a documentary short about Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge that's now short-listed for an Oscar nomination.

So when Sin found herself with a doughnut shop of her own, it was perhaps no surprise that she set out to reimagine the kind of shops that she grew up with. Her efforts to earn a living by embracing one culinary feature of American culture while trying to retain and celebrate some of the traditions of her native Cambodia epitomize in many ways the challenges facing first- and second-generation US immigrants.

"The thing I want to do differently is actually let it be known that we are Cambodians," Sin said. "There's nothing in a Cambodian doughnut shop that says they're Cambodian," she noted, explaining that many immigrant owners, who often sell cigarettes and lottery tickets alongside the Bavarian Creams, don't want to ruin the homey, all-American image of the mom-and-pop doughnut shop. "They feel like then, Americans might question their doughnuts." Yet, anyone with knowledge of the recent history of American doughnut-making knows better than that. "We sort of saved the doughnut-making art," Sin said.

One of the lesser-known facts about the humble doughnut business is that the majority of California doughnut shops are run by Cambodian immigrants, many of whom fled their homeland's political upheavals during the late 1970s and '80s. Sin's brother-in-law, who started the now-closed Lee's Donuts in 1985, was among the first wave of immigrants who perpetuated the trend, helping other immigrants like himself open their own Lee's Donuts.

In Buddha Is Hiding, a study of Cambodian immigrants in California, UC Berkeley professor Aihwa Ong traced the proliferation of Cambodian-owned doughnut shops to immigrants such as Ted Ngoy, who started as a trainee at a Winchell's doughnut shop, and by the mid-1980s had developed his own doughnut shop franchise by training hundreds of fellow Cambodian immigrants eager for jobs. Those trainees, in turn, created their own franchises.

In addition to the convenience of working at a job that required little understanding of English, Ong pointed out that doughnut shops were easy to run because family members often worked for free, thus keeping overhead low. People like Ngoy, she wrote, "become the capitalists who seed new business units that are partially based on exploiting the unpaid labor of relatives and minority friends." This helps explain how Cambodians ended up running a majority of doughnut shops in the state. Ong sees a similar pattern in the flourishing of Vietnamese-run nail salons.

Shortly after taking over Allstar, Sin started running Cambodian barbecue cookouts in the patio dining space. "It's one of my favorite things to eat," she says of the lemongrass-marinated beef skewers and chicken wings that Allstar offers on weekends. Sin may have left Cambodia when she was just a kid, but there are still things she misses about living there. While Cambodian barbecue is available year-round in her homeland, Sin only finds it available during New Year's in Stockton. "I thought, why not have a place where you can serve that year-round?"

Pretty soon, a banner was hung outside Allstar that advertised "Cambodian BBQ" — much to her family's dismay. "They didn't think the taste would be appealing to Americans," Sin says. Sin's boyfriend Ben Hamamoto, a columnist at the Japanese-American newspaper Nichi Bei Times, helps man the grill at the outdoor patio while Sin makes the marinades herself.

The weekend cookouts have generated positive buzz with locals. Commentators on the foodie web site Chowhound have followed the Cambodian menu, which Sin plans to expand beyond just barbecue. One commentator raved of the chicken wings, "The result is the best of home-style cooking. Bold, garlicky, clean flavors and still juicy."

And the fact that there is no culinary connection between Cambodian cuisine and doughnuts didn't stop Sin from tricking out her fried dough rings with Southeast Asian flavors like mango jelly, or experimenting with new varieties, such as one based on sangkaya, a pumpkin flan dessert popular in her homeland.

There are other plans in the works. Sin is looking to upgrade to a gourmet coffee vendor, and once she catches her breath, she'll change the outside sign to reflect her shop's new name: Yellow Brick Donuts. She's also working on improving the doughnut base by making it from scratch.

Landlord Kenneth Le, who leases out doughnut shops to many Cambodian families, says that out of all the business owners he's worked with Sin is certainly the youngest. She's also somewhat of an anomaly. The unglamorous work of selling doughnuts, filled as it is with long, unpopular hours, doesn't usually stay in the family, as younger and second-generation Cambodian Americans tend to look elsewhere for opportunities. The storefronts are then either closed down or sold, something Le said is now happening with many Cambodian-run doughnut shops.

"She really wants to work way harder to start her business," Le said of Sin. "The second generation, they don't want to do that."

In a sense, Sin is retracing the steps of her predecessors by taking on a job in a distinctly American industry. But while she is busting her chops to run a doughnut shop, she's doing it on her own terms: using an all-American icon as a means to celebrate the traditions of her homeland. That's a strategy that Sin's former teacher Richard Kim, an assistant professor of Asian American Studies at UC Davis, says just might be a savvy business decision. "With the East Bay area, there's the fetishization of ethnic foods," he notes. "She's playing to a certain market as well. Her clientele might include actual Cambodians, but I'm sure most of it is a non-Cambodian clientele as well. So it's a way of exposing them to Cambodian cuisine."

Sin herself sees a relation between her new line of work and the Asian American Studies classes she took in college. "I'm doing what I've been reading about, in terms of all the Asian immigrants who did doughnut shops, and who slaved and bent over backward," she said.

And as for her family? Well, they work for her now.