It’s not called the wheel, it’s not called the carousel, it’s called the donut.
Mister Donut [Japanese relict version] in Hong Kong.

Starting in young adulthood, my once robust sweet tooth and my propensity for consuming junk food in general (bagged snacks, carbonated sugary drinks, etc.) gradually faded away. A slice of cheesecake or a pint of ice cream every month or couple of months is more than sufficient to satisfy any sugar cravings now. Moreover, though many a video travelogue from some influencer visit to the city will feature the consumption of a local treat like pineapple buns (which contain no pineapple) or egg waffles or locally-popular regional things like Japanese mochi, none of those items appeals to me and living in Hong Kong has made avoiding sugary stuff easier still.

At some point over the summer, S. noticed an announcement in a local news outlet about the entrance of a popular Japanese donut chain to the Hong Kong market. She shared the article and, as I scanned the text, I was surprised when my eyes alighted on a once-familiar but nearly-forgotten name: Mister Donut.

The small suburban town of my childhood boasted a pair of shopping centers with enormous and usually almost empty parking lots, a diner, a small movie theater, a non-chain shoe store, and a Mister Donut. Donuts were a rare treat growing up but from time to time we got a square box of a dozen, printed with the Mister Donut logo, and my favorites — and virtually the only type I would consume, though I recall being willing to accept a glazed donut now and then — were the ones filled with angel cream (a mixture of icing sugar and cream cheese, if the recipes online are representative), washed down with cold whole milk. Custard-cream-filled donuts seemed similar — even interchangeable — to some adults but were anathema to me. At some point, when I’d gotten older and was living an hour or two’s drive away in a place where the donut shop niche was occupied by faux-sophisticated upmarket coffee/café chains like Starbucks and Au bon Pain, the Mister Donut back home was shuttered. After I-dunno-how-long, it re-opened under a new name and new, non-chain ownership. Still, to this day, afaik it’s a donut place.

While Mister Donut was evaporating in America, I was too preoccupied with other matters to take much notice. Nowadays, it’s easy to search online, skim the Mister Donut Wikipedia article, read through selected contemporaneous newspaper articles, etc. and get a sense of the intertwined history of Mister Donut and Dunkin’ Donuts. It was news to me that the latter came first. Dunkin’ began in 1950 in Quincy, Massachusetts and Mister Donut sprang up in 1956 in Boston after a falling-out between the Dunkin’ founder and his brother-on-law, the man who started up Mister Donut with his own son-in-law. Decades later, in 1989, Dunkin’ was bought by a megacorp holding company from the UK and that holding company quickly turned around and bought Mister Donut the next year and American Mister Donut franchisees were encouraged to transition to Dunkin’ Donuts branding and offerings. Currently, there seems to be a single holdout Dunkin Donuts in Godfrey, Illinois. My hometown’s Mister Donut didn’t pass through a Dunkin’ phase before it closed, to the best of my knowledge, though I may be mistaken.

Tthe brand didn’t disappear entirely from the rest of the world, however. There were (and are) thousands of thriving Mister Donut shops and stalls overseas, run by independent franchisees who bought (or bought an entity that had decades earlier purchased) and wholly own the right to operate Mister Donut in their territories. They’re analogous to something from biology known as a relict population:

In biogeography and paleontology, a relict is a population or taxon of organisms that was more widespread or more diverse in the past. A relictual population is a population currently inhabiting a restricted area whose range was far wider during a previous geologic epoch. Similarly, a relictual taxon is a taxon (e.g. species or other lineage) which is the sole surviving representative of a formerly diverse group.

When the Mister Donut in K11 opened on October 26th, 2024, it popped up in the local news again. S. and I swung by on a Sunday in mid-November. Weeks after its grand opening, the line of customers still looped and stretched and snaked around that floor of the mall. We’re not big for queuing and so left empty-handed.

On another Sunday a half-month later, the line was down to just a half-dozen people and we stuck it out for the few minutes necessary to reach the counter and place our order. Angel-cream-filled donuts were one of the types on offer, along with a custard-creams and other types that didn’t strike my fancy. Buying by the dozen isn’t an option for a Japanese Mister Donut customer. They use weird oblong boxes that can hold either 6 or 10 donuts in a row. At the HK store, at least for now, buyers are limited to copping 10 or fewer donuts at a time (of which no more than 4 may be of the highly-coveted lumpy-circle Pon de Ring type).

The text printed on the long side of the box reads as follows:

Since its first shop opened in Minoh, Osaka in 1971, Mister Donut has become the favourites of locals and visitors. For further expansion in Asia, we are now finally in Hong Kong to serve our freshly made donuts and deliver happy moments to every customer!

It’s been my experience that Westerners have an irritating tendency to fawn over Japanese fare that they would find extremely unimpressive if it were served to them in their home-country equivalent of a diner, on normal flatware and with Western-style utensils. There would be no dopey rhapsodizing about its charming simplicity or deluded make-believe about the imagined freshness of the not-especially-fresh ingredients.

We got a box of ten: some angel-creams, some crullers, and some plain chocolate-tops. No Pon de Rings. S. had her first-ever angel-cream donut but didn’t seem terribly impressed. For me, it was an opportunity to dip back (ever so briefly) into my childhood.

The angel-creams of my youth were completely coated in powdered (aka icing) sugar and I recall the filling-stuffed cavity frequently being disappointing small (as in grape-sized) on many occasions. The Japanese Mister Donut version is lightly dusted with granulated sugar (not a plus or a minus in my view) and much more generously stuffed (a clear plus). On the other hand, both the filling and the dough of the donut are much lighter and airier (read: insubstantial) than I remember.

My nostalgic yearning having been satisfied, it’s unlikely that we’ll rush back anytime soon.

The title of this post alludes to a line from Don Draper’s Carousel Pitch to Kodak in the season 1 finale [SE1E13] of the Mad Men television series (video of this scene).