The Donut King: how Cambodian refugees came to own LA's donut shops

If you buy a donut from an independent shop in Los Angeles — not a chain, the corner place with the fluorescent sign and the rotating display case — there is roughly an 85% chance the family behind the counter is Cambodian-American. That is not a coincidence and it is not folklore. It is the legacy of one man, Ted Ngoy, who fled the Khmer Rouge with nothing, learned to make donuts in a Southern California strip mall, and built a system that put a refugee community in command of an entire American trade ^[1].

From Camp Pendleton to Christy’s

Ted Ngoy was Chinese-Cambodian, a man with some means in Phnom Penh who lost everything when the Khmer Rouge took the city in 1975. He escaped, made it to the United States, and landed — like tens of thousands of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees that year — at Camp Pendleton, the Marine base north of San Diego that served as a processing center. Sponsored out of the camp, he took a job pumping gas, and then a second job at a Winchell’s Donuts, where he learned the craft: the proofing, the frying, the glazing, the brutal pre-dawn hours ^[1].

In 1977 he bought his own shop — Christy’s Donuts in La Habra, named for his wife, Christy (Suganthini) Ngoy. It worked. Donuts had everything a capital-poor immigrant operator needed: cheap equipment, a simple repeatable product, cash business, and hours so unattractive to most Americans that the rent stayed low. Ngoy expanded fast. By the late 1980s he controlled somewhere between 32 and 70 shops — accounts vary — and was, by reputation, a millionaire ^[1].

The sponsorship-chain model

What made Ngoy “the Donut King” wasn’t the number of shops he owned; it was the system he built to multiply them. He trained relatives and fellow refugees to run donut shops, then leased shops to them — often on terms that let an operator buy in over time. He sponsored over a hundred Cambodian families out of the refugee camps and into the trade. Those families, once established, sponsored more. The chain compounded: one operator becomes ten, ten become a hundred, and within a generation an entire community is running a trade ^[1].

By the figures usually cited in the reporting around The Donut King, California has roughly 3,000 donut shops — about 1,500 in the LA metro area alone — more than 90% of them independently owned, and Cambodian-Americans own an estimated 80-90% of LA’s independent donut shops ^[1]. The model was self-replicating in a way no franchise could match, because the bonds holding it together were family, sponsorship debt, and refugee solidarity rather than corporate contracts.

The pink box

The single most recognizable artifact of this history is the pink donut box — now so associated with Los Angeles that it shows up in films and TV as visual shorthand for the city. It exists because of refugee economics. In the 1980s a Cambodian shop owner asked the box supplier Westco for something cheaper than the standard white box; Westco happened to have a surplus of pink-dyed cardboard stock sitting in its warehouse, ran it through the standard donut-box cut stamp, and sold it for a few cents less. Word spread through the Cambodian-shop network — to Minnesota and beyond — and a cost-saving choice, repeated across hundreds of independent shops, became a citywide icon. (LAist’s account adds that the pink-box manufacturer was itself a company started by another of Ngoy’s relatives; some accounts credit the pink box specifically to Ngoy’s protégé Ning Yen, or to Ngoy himself.) The pink box is what thrift looks like when enough people make the same thrifty choice ^[1][5].

Ngoy’s arc

The Donut King’s own story does not end in triumph. Ted Ngoy lost his fortune to gambling — Las Vegas, high-stakes habits, the slow erosion of an empire built on thin margins and personal guarantees. He eventually returned to Cambodia, and the man who had brought a hundred families to America ended up, for a time, living in difficult circumstances back where he started. The full arc — the rise, the system, the collapse — is told in Alice Gu’s 2020 documentary The Donut King, which is the reason much of this history is now widely known ^[2].

The second generation reinvents it

The trade Ngoy founded did not stay frozen. The children of those first-generation operators grew up behind the counter and then remade the shop in their own image — keeping the family business but adding flavor invention, novelty formats, and Instagram. The visible names include Mayly Tao at DK’s Donuts in Santa Monica (Ngoy’s niece; the “DK” predates but now happily reads as “Donut King”), Danette Kuoch at California Donuts in East Hollywood (the rainbow display case that became a social-media destination), plus SK Donuts, Knead Donuts & Tea, and others. Their donuts run to ube glaze, crème brûlée tops, Texas-size novelty rings, and seasonal specials photographed for a feed ^[3]. It is the same lineage — the same families, the same pink boxes, often the same locations — translated into a generation that grew up American.

The shops that aren’t part of this story

It matters not to over-attribute. A good number of LA’s beloved donut shops are not Cambodian-owned, and conflating them erases their own histories:

• Donut Man (Glendora) — Jim Nakano, Japanese-American; the strawberry- and peach-stuffed donut destination.
• Donut Friend (Highland Park) — Mark Trombino, a record producer (Drive Like Jehu, blink-182, Jimmy Eat World) who pivoted to vegan-leaning, punk-named donuts.
• Randy’s Donuts (Inglewood) — the giant-rooftop-donut landmark, built in 1952, now operated as a franchise under Mark Kelegian’s ownership.
• Stan’s Donuts (Westwood) — Stan Berman, a Westwood Village fixture for decades (closed 2020).
• Primo’s Donuts (Sawtelle) — Ralph Primo, Italian-American, family-run since 1956.
• Trejo’s Donuts (Hollywood) — Danny Trejo, the actor, as part of his LA food ventures.

For these, the directory records the actual owner story; it does not assume “Cambodian-American” just because the product is donuts.

How the directory files it

There is no cambodian-donut-shop cuisine slug — that would model an ownership lineage as if it were a service format, and it would apply to most of the donut-shop category anyway. Instead the Cambodian-American lineage lives as an editorial note: on the donut-shop slug (with the non-Cambodian exclusions listed), and individual shops carry a heritage: cambodian-american field plus generation: first|second where it’s known. The product is American donuts; the people are a chapter of refugee history; both facts get kept.