The entire extended family was gathered in Seattle before her youngest son’s wedding, so Kim Sok seized the opportunity to tour a few of the area’s doughnut shops. Sok had previously owned doughnut businesses in Los Angeles and Texas; looking for a new one to buy was sort of a low-grade pastime.

That self-guided tour back in 2017 took her to King Donuts, the laundromat–doughnut shop–teriyaki joint that had been a community hub in Rainier Beach for decades. A conversation sparked. The price was right. Sok summoned one of her five sons, Travis Chhuor, who was living in Texas with his family. She looped in her eldest, Hong Chhuor, who had just bought a house nearby. A new family business began—so did a new chapter for a neighborhood institution.

In 1987, Chea Pol and Heng Hay opened the original King Donuts, on Rainier Avenue South. Over the years, King Donuts added washers and dryers and a menu of teriyaki and fried rice. Neighborhood regulars gathered to wash clothes, play cards, and generally hang out. Pol and Hay had retired by the time Kim Sok and her family acquired the shop, but they shared a personal history as refugees, fleeing the genocidal Khmer Rouge.

As detailed in his self-published memoir and a documentary, Donut King, a refugee named Ted Ngoy opened a doughnut shop in Southern California in the 1970s. He went on to sponsor visas for other incoming Cambodians and offer them jobs in his growing doughnut empire. Until Ngoy suffered a fairly spectacular fallout dealing with a gambling addiction, he was the Johnny Appleseed of doughnut shops, equipping a generation of Cambodian refugees with the means to open their own places across the country—from California to Seattle and far beyond.

Kim Sok and her then-husband, Heng Chhuor arrived in the US in 1985 with their children. Like many Chinese-Cambodians before them, they found running doughnut shops offered an economic toehold in a new country. The family had a shop in California, then Texas, before opening a place in Seattle.

Hong Chhuor doesn’t exactly know how his father first came to learn the trade. Sitting in King Donuts one morning wearing a green KUOW hoodie, he ponders whether his childhood memory is accurate: “I think that every single one of my father’s siblings also owned at least one shop.” It sounds cheesy, he allows, but “Doughnuts were an avenue to pursue the American dream.”

According to family lore, Sok started Travis in the business of making doughnuts the night he graduated from high school back in Texas. He returned to Seattle and became the sole baker for King Donuts, often arriving at 3am. “I don’t know that he has an amazing love for doughnuts,” says Hong, the de facto family spokesman. “He’s just the type of person who has a strong sense of responsibility. And pride in the product of his work.” At King Donuts, Travis made the classics: maple bars, jelly filled, raised and cake doughnuts with chocolate icing and sprinkles. You could pile these straightforward $1.50 indulgences in a baker’s box by the dozen. But clearly the person in the kitchen cared.

However, no one in the extended family had the skill set necessary to run a laundromat, especially one populated with aging machines. Labor shortages and food costs made the teriyaki menu feel unwieldy. The brothers didn’t like their mother working 14-hour days. In 2021, they jettisoned the other two parts of the business model and became, simply, a doughnut shop. In 2022, King Donuts made another big change: The family moved the shop seven blocks north.

At 9am on a Friday, every table at the new location is full of families, of friends catching up over coffee, and of plenty of construction workers in neon vests. The space at 7820 Rainier Ave S (formerly Beach Bakery) doesn’t loom as prominently on the roadside as the original location. It’s modern and bright, decidedly lacking in the old building’s funky quirks.

When the family first bought King Donuts, Hong was well aware they had acquired something beyond just a means to sell apple fritters. “It’s a responsibility—it’s more than a business, it means something to the community,” he says. The South End has lost more than its share of landmarks lately, like Borracchini’s Bakery and Mutual Fish Co. “It was important for us to stay in the neighborhood.”

The new location came with an espresso machine, which lets Hong flex his experience from 13 years as a barista. And Travis Chhuor is no longer the guy filling the display case with doughnuts.

After helping get the new location open, the younger Chhuor brother trained to become EMT, says Hong. Kim Sok followed him up to Bonney Lake, where she’s a full-time grandma. Now Hong runs things with his husband, Razz Hass, who has graduated to chief doughnut maker. A generation ago, owning a doughnut shop helped his parents assimilate; now the business has evolved to meet a different set of family needs. And keep on serving a neighborhood that could use some continuity.