Doughnuts - Greg Nichols

Dunkin’
and the
D ughnut
Kıng
Ted Ngoy overcame
poverty and escaped genocide,
made a fortune off
doughnuts and gambled it
all away. Today, Ngoy is
back on top — but America’s
biggest doughnut chain
could threaten the hundreds of
California shops that are
his legacy.
By Greg Nichols
Photograph by Giulio Di Sturco
Illustrations by Guy Wolek
40
It’s August in
Modesto, and the
Central Valley sun
is blistering hot
outside of the new
Dunkin’ Donuts.
Nigel Travis, the CEO of Dunkin’, is standing at a podium on a
small patch of concrete near the terminus of his company’s first
drive-thru in California. A few feet away, a human being encased
head-to-toe in a foam coffee-cup suit is waving at customers, who
are fanning themselves at the end of a line that has spilled out of
the shop. In the near distance, lunch-goers shuffle from their cars
to the cool sanctuaries of McDonald’s, Jack in the Box, and Taco
Bell. Despite the heat, Travis, who is tall and bespectacled, with
swept-back gray hair, is wearing a thick suit jacket, the checked
pattern of which forecasts the fact that he’s British and softens the
surprise of his heavy accent.
Dunkin’ Donuts controls 56 percent of the nation’s doughnut
market and sells more coffee by the cup than Starbucks. Still, it has
never managed to be successful in California. The chain expanded
West in the 1980s, opening a total of 15 locations across the state,
but by 2002 it had shut down all of them. Travis took over as CEO
in 2009, and under his leadership, Dunkin’ has decided to try again.
In 2012, the chain opened a new location on Camp Pendleton, north
of San Diego. A short time later, Travis announced a California push
that made its previous attempt look puny: Dunkin’ has signed 200
franchise agreements in the state and plans to add up to 1,000 more
locations in the coming years.
Dunkin’ views California as its manifest destiny. In the mid-1950s,
William Rosenberg, founder of the then-tiny East Coast chain, visited
Southern California during a nationwide fact-finding tour. He noticed
that the driver’s seat, not the kitchen table, was the new breakfast
battleground in the West. He also noticed that Californians loved
42
doughnuts. For the harried driver, no meal was
simpler or cheaper or tastier than a doughnut,
which could be eaten with one hand. California
shop owners had erected garish doughnut sculptures alongside freeways and busy thoroughfares
to lure hungry motorists. Here indeed was the
promised land, a magical place where doughnuts
hung in the sky to be glazed by the setting sun.
Modesto’s newest drive-thru is crammed
with idling cars. Every 20 seconds or so, a
driver, attempting to exit, must pass awkwardly
through the gathered crowd. “What you’ll see
here in this Modesto Dunkin’ Donuts is our
extensive array of delicious food and beverage
options,” says Travis. “This includes our famous
hot coffee, iced coffee, iced tea, lattes, Coolattas,
and breakfast sandwiches. Some people who
have been associated with Dunkin’ for years say
to me, ‘Wow, where did those breakfast sandwiches come from? They’re really good!’” As
he says this, Travis gazes at a minivan inching
nervously forward.
Directly across the street, another doughnut
shop is also jammed with customers. Mr. T’s
Delicate Donut, owned by Winnie Hou, has
been a local favorite for more than 20 years.
Inside, a man in the open kitchen is turning
doughnuts in the fryer with a pair of long
wooden sticks. Compared to Dunkin’ Donuts’s
slick corporate branding and data-driven interior layout, which is designed to move people
through the line as quickly as possible, Mr. T’s
looks haphazard. A few marble tables sit beside
a row of large windows, and a fluorescent-lit
display case focuses attention on more than 30
varieties of doughnuts.
Yet Mr. T’s is more than it appears. It is one
link in a network of nearly 1,500 independent
doughnut shops that anchor strip malls and
brighten main streets from San Ysidro to Arcata,
and that for more than three decades have pummeled chains like Winchell’s, Krispy Kreme, and,
during its first California expansion, Dunkin’
Donuts. Perhaps the most surprising thing about
these ubiquitous shops, and a significant contributor to their resilience, is that almost all of
them are owned by Cambodian Americans.
At the counter in Mr. T’s, I meet Sandy Hou, a
smiley University of California, Irvine, student
who’s spending the summer helping out at her
family’s shop. I order a doughnut and ask if she’s
worried about Dunkin’ coming into Modesto.
She shrugs, and her answer echoes what I’ve
heard from Cambodian shop owners all over
the state. “Our customers are loyal,” she says,
placing a chocolate bar in a white paper bag.
“We’re not going anywhere.”
from Modesto, along
the southern tail of the Mekong River, the man
who brought Cambodians into the California
doughnut business stands to make a toast. Ted
Ngoy is 74. His graying hair has retreated to the
crown of his head, and his loose slacks cut an
equatorial line across his small paunch. Only
his doughnut-fed cheeks remain incongruously youthful. Before him, about 15 members
of Cambodia’s upper crust nod appreciatively
around a tamarind wood table. Among them are
the official spokesperson for the royal government, a senator, a doctor whose name adorns a
university, and the owner of the upscale butchery in which they all sit. They are in Phnom
Penh, the muggy capital of Cambodia, a country
of remembered atrocity and sputtering rebirth,
of doughnut magnates–turned–high-society
players. Several of those gathered have direct ties
to the doughnut industry in California, where
refugees from the war-torn nation taught one
another to bake in neighborhood shops up and
down the state, and where a few savvy businessmen amassed fortunes that allowed them
to return to Cambodia and wield influence.
EIGHT THOUSA N D M I LES
CaliforniaSunday.com
“May we all know unity and friendship,” Ngoy proclaims in Khmer;
it’s a simple toast, but one that acts powerfully on the room. As
charcuterie arrives on communal plates, the assembled dignitaries
barrage Ngoy with toasts of their own. From the tone of the tributes,
a visitor who doesn’t speak the language can safely guess the gist:
Long live the Doughnut King of California. Long live Ted Ngoy.
Ted Ngoy, in 1977,
in front of the
first doughnut
shop he bought,
in La Habra
B U N T E K N G O Y touched down at Camp Pendleton on a military
plane in May of 1975 with his wife and three young children. He
had no home and no money, and his country had been overrun by
a gang of pitiless thugs.
At 35, Ngoy had already climbed out of poverty and into privilege
once. Born to a single mother in a town along the northern border
with Thailand, he grew up in a close-knit Chinese Cambodian community. Ngoy wanted more, so he moved to Phnom Penh, where
he rented a shared room and began
studying French and English.
He fell in love with a beautiful
Here indeed was the
girl from his language classes. She
promised land, a magical place
belonged to one of the country’s
where doughnuts hung
most well-regarded families, and
in the sky to be glazed by the
young men of excellent standsetting sun.
ing were already lining up for her
hand. When Ngoy heard her name,
Suganthini, which means “fragrance,” he smelled flowers. The
dingy apartment where he lived happened to face her family’s
villa. They began a correspondence, he remembers, and Suganthini
flirtatiously dared him to visit her room. Ngoy climbed through
barbed wire and past armed guards, alighting beside an open
bathroom window in the villa. He virtually lived in her room
for weeks, hiding whenever servants came to tidy it. On the
30th night, they took turns cutting their fingers under the full
moon, swearing oaths of fealty. Much later, Ngoy would break his
43
oath, and that betrayal, he believes, would lead to his downfall.
Over the strong objections of Suganthini’s parents, the couple
married. Suganthini’s brother-in-law was a top general, and after
Ngoy joined the army in 1970, he was quickly promoted to major.
Cambodia, however, was poised to enter a sustained nightmare. A
coup d’etat in March of that year unseated the prince, setting off a
civil war with communist guerrilla fighters intent on ousting the
new pro–United States regime.
Ngoy was assigned to an embassy in Thailand, where he,
Suganthini, and their daughter and two sons went to live in relative security. But he traveled to Phnom
Penh regularly. On his final trip, in
Instead of baking once in
April of 1975, he received word that
the morning, he decided to bake
the capital would fall. One of the last
in smaller batches throughout
flights out, he remembers, was on a
the day. The doughnuts at
U.S. military plane that had dropped
Christy’s would always be fresh.
off a supply of rice. Rockets were falling all around the airfield as Ngoy ran
for the plane. The communists took
Phnom Penh the next day, he says, and Pol Pot’s bloody reign commenced. Between 2 to 3 million people would be executed in just
under four years, and famine would kill hundreds of thousands more.
After a month in a refugee camp in Bangkok, Ngoy and his family
were sent to Camp Pendleton, where they stayed in a barracks until
O P P O S I T E PAG E
Hakmeng and
Ratana Tea at
their shop,
Sunny Donuts,
in San Diego
congregants of Peace Lutheran Church in nearby
Tustin sponsored their visas. They moved into
a small rented house, and Peace Lutheran gave
Ngoy a job as a groundskeeper and custodian.
His sponsor, an affable man named Dean, helped
him secure a second job pumping gas at a Mobil
station at night.
One evening at the Mobil, when the traffic died
down, a co-worker asked Ngoy to watch the station while he ran across the street to a shop called
DK’s Donuts. When the co-worker returned, he
opened a box and told Ngoy to choose a doughnut. Ngoy had never had one, so he picked at random. The taste reminded him of the Cambodian
round cakes he ate growing up. He began stopping
by DK’s after his shift, and he noticed its steady
stream of customers at all hours.
Though his English was limited and he knew
nothing about business, Ngoy crossed the street
one evening and asked the two women at the
counter how to open a doughnut shop. They
told him it would be risky for someone with no
experience and recommended he look into the
manager’s training program at Winchell’s, the
dominant doughnut chain in California at the
time. Dean gave him a glowing recommendation, and Ngoy became the first in a long line
of Indo-Chinese immigrants accepted into the
Winchell’s training program.
The curriculum was rigorous. For $500 a
month in wages, Ngoy cleaned every inch of
the teaching store in La Mirada, handled the
money, and baked every doughnut on the menu.
He had no culinary experience and had trouble with the exacting jargon of baking, but he
proved a quick study. When he completed the
program, Winchell’s gave him a store to manage
in Newport Beach. He took pride in adhering to
the company’s three pillars of success: cleanliness, service, and quality. He also enjoyed chatting with customers and practicing his English.
They had trouble with his Cambodian name,
Bun Tek, so they called him Ted.
One day in 1976, a customer came in with a
copy of the Orange County Register. The man had
circled a small ad in the classifieds: Doughnut
shop for sale . “Ted, you should buy it,” he
said. The price for the business, a shop called
Christy’s Donuts in nearby La Habra, was
$45,000. Ngoy had saved $20,000 working at
Winchell’s, and the sellers loaned him the balance. Just a year after Ngoy arrived in the U.S.,
he bought a doughnut shop.
He spent a month working as an employee
under the old owners to get the hang of things.
When he took over, he made just one operational
Photographs by Stephanie Gonot
change. Instead of baking once in the morning,
he decided to bake in smaller batches throughout the day. The doughnuts at Christy’s would
always be fresh. Ngoy kept his job managing
the Winchell’s, and Suganthini helped run the
new shop. With two incomes, Ngoy paid off his
loan, and the next year he purchased a second
shop in Fullerton.
T O C E L E B R AT E I T S Modesto opening, Dunkin’
unveiled a California doughnut , filled with
Bavarian Kreme and decorated to look like a
mellow smiley face wearing sunglasses. But the
sign outside of the chain’s new Modesto location carries a revealing tag line: COffEE anD
MOrE . “If you take our U.S. sales as a whole,
57 percent are beverages,” Travis, the CEO , tells
me soon after shearing a ribbon with a giant
pair of pink-handled scissors. “When I came on
the scene more than five years ago, we looked
at our name, which is so iconic. We wanted to
demonstrate that beverages are very important. That’s where ‘coffee and more’ came from.
Perhaps we should have added something about
sandwiches, also.”
Dunkin’ Donuts’s strategy is part of a broader
shift in the fast-food industry. Breakfast and beverages are selling far better than other menu
items. “The restaurant industry has not been
faring well since the recession,” explains Bonnie
Riggs, an analyst at the npD Group, a market-research company, “but one bright spot has been
the breakfast area. It’s where the opportunity is.”
According to Riggs, fast food now accounts for
85 percent of all breakfast visits in the restaurant industry. As chains add to their menus to
draw morning customers, seemingly disparate
brands like Starbucks, Subway, and Taco Bell
are competing directly with one another — and
with McDonald’s, the breakfast king.
Dunkin’ Donuts is an obvious front-runner in
the Breakfast Wars. As a doughnut chain, it has
always catered to the morning set, and it’s well
known for its coffee. The move to California is
an attempt to expand its breakfast hegemony.
“California gets you in market position because
of density of population,” says John Gordon, a
restaurant-industry analyst in San Diego, “and
because of the presence of so many cars, because
it’s a commuter lifestyle.”
But the Massachusetts brand is still an outsider. Earlier this year, the company found itself
embroiled in a local controversy when the developer of a new Dunkin’ outpost in Long Beach
announced plans to demolish a giant doughnut that had been towering over the site — the
previous location of a Mrs. Chapman’s Angel Food Donuts — since
1958. It was a beloved landmark and a handy guidepost for locals,
who invariably referred to it when giving directions, but the developer
worried that it would distract from Dunkin’ Donuts’s diversification
strategy. “We want to be good neighbors,” Dan Almquist, the managing partner of the franchising company, tells me, explaining why he
ended up relenting and letting the structure stand. In an interview
with the Los Angeles Times, Almquist said, “The last thing we want
to do is be viewed as the guys that killed the doughnut.”
O P P O S I T E PAG E
Mayly Tao at DK’s
Donuts & Bakery
in Santa Monica
y 1980, Ted Ngoy owned 20 Christy’s shops in
Southern California. Although the locations shared
a name, he made no effort to give them a cohesive
brand identity. Scouring classifieds, Ngoy looked
for existing shops for sale by owner. When he
found one, he would sit out front in his car for
hours, drinking coffee and tallying customers. He
noted foot and car traffic and became deft at estimating a store’s
approximate revenue, which helped him during negotiations. Three
decades earlier, William Rosenberg had perfected the same technique
while scouting new Dunkin’ locations on the Eastern Seaboard.
Rents on Ngoy’s shops varied, but properties rarely cost more than
$300 to $400 per month. Ngoy locked in good deals with 20-year
leases. After he took over a shop, he ran it himself for one month to
assess operating costs and revenues. He kept the old staff in place
and made every effort to maintain the recipes just as they had been.
Americans, he found, didn’t like change. He did insist on using the
highest-quality ingredients, and if a store’s flour wasn’t up to his
standards, he would replace it with
a superior product. He also always
baked small batches around the clock.
Dunkin’ Donuts is an
When he had a feel for the economobvious front-runner in the
ics of a location, Ngoy put word out
Breakfast Wars. The move
that a turnkey business was available
to California is an attempt to
for lease. Large Cambodian families
expand its hegemony.
with a built-in labor force of siblings,
cousins, aunts, and uncles would
come forward. Christy’s stores operated as independent entities,
but owners leveraged their combined purchasing power to keep the
cost of ingredients low. A single shop wouldn’t make anybody rich,
but it did offer a reliable way for refugees with limited English and
few marketable skills to earn an independent living.
Throughout the early 1980s, Ngoy sponsored visas for hundreds
of Cambodians who had fled the chaos back home. He gave them
jobs in his shops, where most tasted their first doughnuts, and set
them up as lessees once they got on their feet. The most ambitious
struck out on their own to open new locations and develop new
markets, often while continuing to lease a few shops from Ngoy.
Incredibly, Winchell’s, once the dominant brand in the region,
started losing ground. Immigrant families figured out how to survive
on a few thousand dollars of profit a month, while large companies
like Winchell’s needed substantially higher returns for a location to
stay viable. Ngoy took over a failed Winchell’s location in Santa Ana
in the early 1980s, a sort of homecoming to the company that gave
him his start. There, he met a soft-spoken young man named Ning
47
invoked flowers, the new one brought to mind
the scent of warm doughnuts. Ngoy became an
active fundraiser in the Republican Party, rallying the Cambodian community around business-minded candidates. His acolytes continued
marching ahead, opening new shops.
Ning Yen at Mag’s
Donuts and
Bakery in Irvine
48
Yen. Like many refugees, Yen had been training with a baker friend
after his ESL classes. Ngoy hired him, and soon Yen became his best
employee. In 1984, Ngoy cosigned a loan enabling his protégé to
lease his own shop in Irvine. “He helped a lot of people like that,”
Yen remembers. “Anything you asked him for, he would help. He’s
a very generous guy.” Yen would go on to open dozens more shops,
as well as a distributorship with Ngoy’s nephew.
By leasing out his holdings, Ngoy kept his day-to-day involvement
in the doughnut business to a minimum. He expanded his empire
north, to Brisbane, Fresno, and San Jose. He and his wife began
traveling abroad and spending weekends in Las Vegas, where they
gambled a little and saw all of the famous crooners. Ngoy especially
loved blackjack, which challenged his strategic mind. By the late
1980s, he had more than 50 shops across the state, and money was
rolling in.
The family moved to a 7,000-square-foot mansion in Mission
Viejo, and Suganthini changed her name to Christy. If the old name
B Y T H E M I D -1 9 8 0 S , when Dunkin’ was pushing
into California, Cambodian shops were prolific,
and the East Coast chain had trouble finding a
foothold. Chains thrive by building efficient
distribution infrastructures and running effective advertising campaigns. With fewer than
20 locations spread across a vast new territory,
Dunkin’ Donuts’s distribution and promotion
costs in California were unsustainably high.
The goal was to reach a critical mass in the new
market, at which point the economic equation
would invert — relative costs of distribution and
advertising fall as the number of locations in a
region climbs. But with so much competition, the
expansion effort was halting. Dunkin’ decided to
cut its losses and began pulling out of Southern
California in the early ’90s.
Hakmeng Tea, a Cambodian refugee in San
Diego who’d chosen to run a Dunkin’ location
instead of an independent shop, still remembers receiving the letter from Massachusetts.
He was taken aback. Overnight, he lost his supplier and his brand identity. The day after taking his Dunkin’ Donuts sign down, he listened
as a longtime customer griped about the new
coffee. Exhausted, Tea explained that he was
still working his way through the old stock of
Dunkin’ beans. The customer was drinking the
same coffee he had been the day before.
Today, the pink and orange décor inside Tea’s
shop will be familiar to many first-time visitors.
Other than the name — Sunny Donuts — Tea
has changed as little as possible about his restaurant. The old stools still swivel before a funky
curved counter, the menu board has the same
bubbly font, and even many of the customers are holdovers from the Dunkin’ days. Tea
continues to bake his doughnuts — more than
50 varieties — by hand, the way he learned at
Dunkin’ Donuts University.
On the day I visit in June, he’s making a
small batch of plain raised doughnuts. He
invites me into the kitchen, where he adds a
half pound of yeast, 12 pounds of doughnut
mix, and water to the barrel-size bowl of his
well-used Hobart stand mixer, which churns
the ingredients into a sticky paste. Scraping
the goop from the sides of the bowl, he lifts
out a ball of dough and places it on a large
sheet of flour-covered canvas, which is stretched
over a butcher-block table. “The canvas is an
old Dunkin’ Donuts trick,” he says conspiratorially. “It makes cleanup easier.” Cleaving the
dough blob in half, he sets one portion aside
and starts rolling the other flat. The dough is
firm and yeasty, and it pushes back against his
wooden rolling pin at first.
When the dough is spread to a half-inch
thickness, Tea uses a punch to cut out rings,
deftly catching each new one on the fingers of
his idle hand. When his fingers fill up, he deals
the rings, like playing cards, onto a nearby wire
sheet. After 15 minutes in a proof box, which
delivers heat and humidity to help the doughnuts rise, the rings have doubled in size and are
ready for the fryer.
Working with hot oil is dangerous, and Tea
has the scars to prove it. As he lowers the tray
into a bubbling vat of 365-degree shortening, the
doughnuts float to the top. Anyone who’s walked
by a doughnut shop knows the smell of sweet
frying dough, but in Tea’s kitchen it is intense,
almost filling. After a few moments, he flips the
doughnuts with a pair of long, delicate sticks.
When they’re golden, he removes the tray from
the fryer, slides it into a rack, and pours glaze
over the doughnuts. The thick mixture melts
off, leaving a thin, sugary sheen. The first bite
of one of these newly birthed creations seems
to disappear as I chew, with only a coating of
sweet grease remaining.
Kitchens like Tea’s require space, and
California real estate is pricey. For its latest push,
Dunkin’ has decided not to make its doughnuts
in stores. Instead, the company is relying on a
process it calls Just Baked on Demand, in which
partially baked frozen products are delivered to
franchise locations and finished in their ovens.
The process will fill shops with a facsimile of the
smell in Tea’s kitchen. Dunkin’ hopes its JBOD
products will help to avert the supply-chain
inefficiency that doomed its first California
locations. But a critical mass of stores is still
necessary for the expansion to be cost effective,
which is why Dunkin’ is racing to open as many
locations as it can.
B Y T H E T I M E Dunkin’ retreated from California
in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Cambodian
American doughnut network was also struggling. Fitness and health-food crazes were
sweeping the country, and doughnuts were
losing some of their appeal. With thousands of
independent doughnut shops in the state, the
market was so crowded that Cambodian owners
began competing against one another to acquire promising locations.
At the same time, the flow of young Cambodian workers slowed to a
trickle. A new generation had grown up in America and saw college
as a more attractive prospect than long hours spent over a deep-fryer.
Ngoy’s personal life was faring even worse. By the mid-1980s,
fueled by his multimillion-dollar fortune and surfeit of idle time,
his gambling had started to spin out of control. He disappeared to
Vegas for long stretches, holing up in casinos to play blackjack and
baccarat. Christy and the children drove out to find him on more
than one occasion. Ngoy remembers hiding in the maze of card
tables and slot machines at Caesars Palace, ashamed to face his
family. His business faltered, and he
began selling off shops to maintain
Suganthini changed her
cash flow.
name to Christy. If the old name
Gambling strained his relationinvoked
flowers, the new
ship with his wife, who felt helpless
one
brought
to mind the scent
to intervene. In a bid to quit cold turof
warm
doughnuts.
key, Ngoy joined a Buddhist monastery in D.C. He shaved his head and
donned a monk’s robes, and he lived
solemnly one day at a time. But when he returned home a month
later, his money and his idle time were waiting. He tried a second
monastery, this time in Thailand, where the monks weren’t permitted
to speak or wear shoes. Ngoy’s feet bled after long walks over the
rocky earth, and he lived in poverty, as he had years before. It was
humbling, but it wasn’t enough. When he returned home, he went
straight to Las Vegas.
After two turbulent decades, Cambodia planned to hold free elections in 1993. Well-to-do Cambodian Americans rushed back to set
up political parties and participate in the democratic process. Ngoy
enjoyed being an uncle figure, a man people turned to when they
needed something, and politics would allow him to play that role
on a larger scale. He also felt that public life would be good for him:
With the country watching, he would have to stop gambling. He sold
his remaining doughnut shops, keeping only a single hamburger
stand, which he turned over to his daughter.
In 1992, with about $2 million in the bank, Ngoy and Christy G R E G N I CH O LS
returned to Cambodia. It didn’t go well. After years of atrocity, is an author and
Cambodians were generally distrustful of the political process, journalist in Los
Angeles. His new
and they were especially wary of outsiders who wanted to join the book is Striking
government. In the 1993 elections, Ngoy’s party failed to win a Gridiron: A Town’s
single parliamentary seat, though he was eventually tapped as an Pride and a Team’s
Shot at Glory During
economic adviser to the prime minister. It was an important role, the Biggest Strike in
but one performed largely out of the public eye. After spending American History.
the last of his savings on a doomed bid to bring hybridized rice to ST E P H A N I E G O N OT
Cambodia, Ngoy was despondent. His return to his home country is a photographer
based in Los
had been far from the victory lap he’d imagined.
Angeles.
At a low point, while Christy was visiting California, Ngoy cheated
on her with a young Cambodian woman, who became pregnant. G I U LI O D I ST U RCO
is a photographer
Christy could weather the gambling addiction, but this was too much. based in Bangkok.
The couple divorced, and Ngoy married his mistress. They would
G U Y WO LE K has
eventually have two children, a girl and a boy.
been illustrating
By 2002, the Doughnut King was broke. Hoping that a return to the in one manner or
place that had made him rich might change his luck, Ngoy accepted another since the
early 1980s. He is
a plane ticket from an old friend and, for the second time, landed based in Oxnard,
in California penniless. In 2005, a writer (Continued on page 59) California.
DU N K I N ’ A N D T H E D OUG H N U T K I NG
(Continued from page 51)
for the Los Angeles Times found him living on the screened-in porch
of a mobile home in Long Beach. He had converted to Christianity,
and nightly he prayed for help.
Later that year, racked with guilt for leaving his new family, Ngoy
returned to Cambodia. His wife lost patience with him. She had
believed he was a wealthy man with a future in politics. At the very
least, she thought he would provide a good life for her and their
children. She met another man, handed the kids over to Ngoy, and
left. Chasing a possible business prospect, Ngoy took the children to
the seaside province of Kep, but the opportunity fizzled. Desperate,
in his late 60s now, he asked a government minister for permission
to stay in his neglected vacation home. The minister would only
allow Ngoy and his children to sleep on the porch.
This was the wet season, and sheets of rain angled under the
porch’s overhang and soaked the meager living space. Each morning,
Ngoy carried his children to school on a rusty bike. At night, they
survived on noodles. Ngoy replayed his life in his head. It was like
watching a movie about someone he recognized but hadn’t seen in
years. Staring into the Gulf of Thailand, he prayed a businessman’s
prayer, asking Jesus for people, connections.
I T ’ S E A R LY J U LY when I land in Phnom Penh. At the airport, Ted
Ngoy slaps my shoulder and pumps my hand vigorously. At 74, he
is full of energy and smiling broadly. Outside, he introduces me
to his new girlfriend, Sreypov, a beautiful 19-year-old woman with
voluminous dark hair. In spite of the eye-popping age difference,
they both say they’re deeply in love.
We hop into a white Lexus SUV , and Sreypov drives toward the
first of Ngoy’s three homes in the capital, all of which are located in
a dusty section of the city called New Phnom Penh. The area seems
half-developed and half-abandoned, and is full of concrete pillars
that end abruptly in thistles of rebar. Ngoy is optimistic that it will
one day become the most desirable neighborhood in the city. It
seems an appropriate backdrop to his unexpected final act. Against
all odds, he is rich again.
During his destitute period in Kep, Ngoy began giving business
advice to locals, and in particular to youngsters in whom he sensed
a kindred entrepreneurial spirit. He wants me to meet a few of them,
so we make the two-hour drive from the capital. On the way, we pass
a fog-shrouded mountain, atop which sits a famous casino. It is like a
lighthouse warning of perilous rocks ahead. “I don’t go there,” Ngoy
says flatly as we pass.
In Kep, we stop for lunch at a rustic shack perched atop pylons
that disappear into the muddy waters of the Gulf of Thailand. Rain
is beating down on the palm-frond roof as we settle in, and a group
of three American tourists glumly eye the stormy waters through
a massive glassless window. Our table, however, which is quickly
strewn with the detritus of our crab feast, is festive. A few of the
entrepreneurs Ngoy advised during his purgatory have come to
pay their respects. One is a scholarly looking travel agent named
Enakrith Lao, whose English is strong.
“I lent him an old bike,” he recalls of his first interactions with
Ngoy. “We began chatting and then eating lunch together.” At that
time, Lao had already been bankrupt once, and he was fearful of
losing more money with a new business. Ngoy corroborates the
advice he gave the young man: “You are young, and you can always
come back. You must want to be rich. If you don’t have that drive,
then I can’t help you.” Lao spent the last of his funds marketing his
business. He has since become successful, and he credits his mentor
for giving him the necessary push.
As Ngoy’s reputation in Kep grew, people began referring to him
as pou, or “uncle,” an honorific in Khmer. The story of his success
in the doughnut business — a story many locals had heard rumors
about already — quickly spread. In the late 2000s, a wealthy businessman, now seated at our table, approached Ngoy asking for
help with some small land deals. Ngoy was a natural at navigating
the bureaucratic nuances involved in such transactions, and he
cleared a commission for his services. He reinvested some of the
money in speculative land purchases, but he also spent much of
it on the community. He went on to fund English classes for local
children and to pay for a new church building in a nearby stretch
of rice paddies and muddy fields.
Ngoy’s big break came in 2009, when a Chinese acquaintance
named Wang Yanyu came looking for him. Yanyu had been
approached by a major Chinese corporation that wanted to acquire
land in Cambodia, where many Chinese factories have opened
recently. Hearing that Ngoy was now involved in real estate in Kep,
Yanyu drew him into the deal. The commission made Ngoy a wealthy
man once again, and he is currently working on several new deals
with Chinese corporations.
Twenty years after he left his network of California shops behind,
and even in the face of Dunkin’ Donuts’s aggressive expansion plan,
Ngoy is optimistic about his doughnut legacy. “It’s hard to make
money with a franchise in a crowded market,” he says, craning his
body from the front seat of the SUV, which Sreypov is expertly maneuvering along a pothole-riddled road in the center of Phnom Penh.
It is my final day in Cambodia, and we’re on our way somewhere
special. “You pay a big fee, and those locations cost so much to rent.
Independent shops don’t need much to survive.” Even if Dunkin’
does take hold in California, Ngoy thinks customers will stay loyal
to the Cambodian-owned shops. It’s tough to resist the allure of
doughnuts baked by hand around the clock, he says.
Sreypov pulls to a stop on the side of the road. The air is hot and
sticky, like the inside of a proof box. Opening his door during a
break in traffic, Ngoy points to a sign above a one-story building:
USA Donuts . The shop opened in 2004, the longtime dream
of a doughnut baker from California. Ngoy discovered it earlier
this year when a reporter from the Phnom Penh Post got in touch
to see if he was that Ted Ngoy. The things he misses most about
California, Ngoy says, are the feeling of the coastal sun just before
sunset, and doughnuts.
The shop is undergoing renovations, and a jackhammer is pulverizing some concrete out front, but the owner assures us it’s
open. In addition to doughnuts, the menu includes burgers and
pizza. But Ngoy is a purist. Approaching the counter, he studies the glass case before making his selection: two plain glazed
doughnuts. Ngoy is a prodigious talker, but as he takes his first
bite, he falls silent for several moments. At last he smiles. “Good
doughnut,” he says.
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