Portland’s Voodoo Doughnut Opens in NYC

The Homer doughnuts are modeled after the Simpsons ideal.
Photo: Courtesy of Voodoo Doughnuts

The world was a very different place in 2003 when a scrappy storefront squeezed between two nightclubs in Portland, Oregon’s Old Town started serving bacon-maple doughnuts next to vegan fritters. The décor included a vintage chandelier, stained-glass windows, and hot-pink walls. “Of course, a 24-hour, crazy doughnut shop that put bacon on a doughnut and sold a doughnut shaped like a blunt could work in early-aughts Portland,” says Kevin Wateman, who started working at Voodoo Doughnut in 2007. (He’s now the creative designer.)

The store got its start when the founders — Kenneth “Cat Daddy” Pogson and Richard “Trace” Shannon — realized the downtown area lacked a doughnut shop. That piqued Pogson’s interest, since he had been working in fine dining and was ready for a change. “Portland was starting to get the notoriety of being such a foodie city,” he says. “And it was my rebellion of that. I’m just like, ‘I want something down and dirty at midnight.’” He’d also been moonlighting as a wrestling announcer, which helped him to understand his target audience. “We knew we’d fit in with this weird little culture that Portland was,” he says. The financial considerations made sense, too. “Twenty-three years ago, the raw cost of a doughnut was like two and a half cents.”

Some of the doughnuts were a hard sell at first. Take, for one, the now-mundane-sounding Bacon Maple Bar, which Pogson says was “instantly reviled” by skeptics. Now, of course, it’s an institution, along with the Voodoo Doll, a doll-shaped raised yeast number crammed with raspberry jelly, slathered with chocolate frosting, and held together by a salty pretzel. Even if not all of their experiments — like ill-fated attempts at topping doughnuts with NyQuil and Tums —worked. Portland became synonymous with weirdness, and Voodoo was in the vanguard. By 2007, Anthony Bourdain had featured the shop (and its Bacon Maple Bar) on No Reservations, cementing its national fame.

Expansion began locally in 2008, and Voodoo migrated out of state, first to Colorado, five years later. In 2017, the private equity firm Fundamental Capital took a majority stake, and expansion ratcheted up along with more corporate sensibilities. “I like to think when we open a new Voodoo in a new city, we bring a little bit of that old-school Portland with us but allow the city to shape us, too,” Waterman says. (In its early days, the shop hosted competitions to see who could stack the most doughnuts on his, uh, member. The winner got $50 and a cream-filled Cock ‘n’ Balls doughnut — almost certainly making it the only Fundamental holding that once hosted dick-measuring contests.)

When it opens in Union Square West this summer, the New York outpost will be the first in the Northeast. A portrait of Bourdain will hang in the store so fans can raise a Maple Bacon Bar in his honor, or one of the New York–specific creations like a Big Apple (cinnamon frosted, fruit filled) or a Glazed Glizzy (a hot dog tucked into a bun-shaped glazed doughnut and zigzagged with maple frosting).

The prices will be in line with other doughnut shops, but will Gen-Z New Yorkers line up for Maple Bacon Bars and blunt-shaped “blazers” the way they do for Greek Froyo outfits that all sell the same thing with nearly identical branding and indistinguishable “aesthetic” interiors? In addition to changing tastes, New York is arguably in the midst of a doughnut heyday. Competition includes Cloudy Donut Co., Elbow Bakery, and Fan-Fan, plus imports such as I’m Donut? from Tokyo; Homie’s, the spinoff of Homers in Montreal; Cops from Toronto; and L.A.’s Randy’s. And then of course we have our own homegrown chain from the era that birthed Voodoo in the first place, Doughnut Plant. On that last name, Pogson is quick to make a distinction. “I have respect for Doughnut Plant, but that’s a gourmet doughnut. We’re exotic doughnuts,” he clarifies. “We took old, classic doughnuts and put weird stuff on them.”