'We Thought That We Will Grow Old Here': Mom-And-Pop Donut Shop Leaves Echo Park

When you run a small business, everything can turn into a number.

For Annenn Nou, it’s the 700 donuts that you can sell on a good day. The 4 a.m. start time to bake said donuts. The almost eight years since she and her husband took the plunge to start their own business.

Of late, a different set of numbers occupies her mind: 08/31.

That's the end of this month, when her Echo Park shop, Ms. Donut, is shutting down. The property was put on the market in October and recently sold.

"We've seen a lot of stores that were here at the same time as us disappear. Like for example, Taco Bell, and KFC became Starbucks. The liquor store that was in front of our store became parking," Nou said.

And the story of Ms. Donut is not just the story of an endlessly changing city.

Annenn Nou inside Ms. Donut, a business she and her husband started in 2015.

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Fiona Ng

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LAist

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The donut bond

There's an oft-cited estimate about donut shops in Southern California, that some 80% of them are owned by Cambodians. The lore started with a man named Ted Ngoy, who fled the Khmer Rouge, landed in Southern California, and carved out an empire on fried dough and glaze.

When newcomers from the old country sought him out, Ngoy was all too happy to impart his knowledge. And one shop after another, the tie between donuts and the diaspora was fortified.

When Nou and her husband Sophany emigrated from Belgium to Southern California in 2015, they knew they wanted to start a business. As to what kind — there was little question.

"It's kind of the Cambodian culture to have a donut shop. If you go see the other donut shop, almost all of the owners of Cambodian. So this was, it was the continuity of that," Nou said.

The couple was living in Riverside County and looked at many storefronts across the region. Six months into their search, they drove up to Echo Park to check out a little standalone donut shop that commands maximum visibility on Glendale Blvd.

Love at first sight

"In French we say, 'le coup de foudre.' It means that you see something or someone, and then right away it's like it's striking you," Nou said. "When we first visited the store, that's how I felt. I knew it. I told my husband 'that's it.'"

They took over the shop from a distant relative, who ran it for 16 years.

"Echo Park is so nice. It's so green. The store was so cute. It was so simple, you know, and nothing too much. It was still vintage, and it was perfect," she said.

The funny thing, they knew nothing about donuts.

Annenn (left) and Sophany Nou with two of their three children at Ms. Donut.

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Fiona Ng

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"My husband learned how to do donuts a few months before, but he was really good at it. So his donuts are really good, I have to be honest. And, I started to learn how to sell donuts and do the pastries — maybe a month before we took over the store."

And so they grinded, raising three young kids from working 12, 15-hour days, seven days a week. Along the way, the Nous became a fixture of the neighborhood.

"Most of the families are coming to a donut shop. We have three, four generations that come and we find out that they are brothers, they are mothers, they are sons, daughters," Nou said. "We've seen them grow. They've seen our children and our family grow too."

Their patrons have rallied around the Nous, creating a GoFundMe campaign and holding fundraisers for the family.

Ms. Donut, the mom-and-pop donut shop in Echo Park.

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Fiona Ng/LAist

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What's next?

What's next is the great unknown. Although the couple would love to revive Ms. Donut, the cost is prohibitive. Nou said she and her husband hope to eventually save up enough to make another go at it. But they know they're done with Echo Park.

"We've seen a lot of change. I'm not saying that it's for the worst or for the better, it's just that we've seen change and we've seen a lot of families that have [been] moving out," said Nou.

"We thought that we will grow old here, that our future was here. So it was kind of shocking and heartbreaking to know that it was about to stop."