♪ Cambodian music ♪
[DONUT PEOPLE]
[Samoeurn Phan]
[Affectionately known as Pou Sam (Uncle Sam)]
[Sam has opened over 20 donut shops for Cambodian families across Houston.]
(Uncle Sam) Well, when I came here in 1994
to eat one donut you didn't realize how much work goes into one donut
until you actually go into doing the donuts.
You know, it takes quite a bit just to make one donut.
I start off by finding a location.
If I find a location,
I get a family that needs a donut shop to go to look at the location,
and if they like it, we negotiate the price,
and if the price is right, I build it for them and turn them the key.
You know, most of them already know how to make donuts.
They work for a family member,
you know, they've already worked for like two, three or five years...
to save up the money to start up the business.
[Chandara Meas Owner of Snowflake Donuts, Galveston]
[Cambodian Immigrant]
(Chandara Meas) When I came to the States,
I don't have no relatives in here,
so I don't speak that much English,
so I gotta start to learn English
and start to work to support myself...
and I don't have chance to go back to college,
so I ended up at a donut shop right now.
Most Cambodians who take us,
they own a donut shop, they run a donut business...
[Congratulations on your new shop Bong! Wish you all the best!]
Yeah, you know, it's hard to do it,
not many people want to do that job as I'm doing right now.
[Countless Cambodians were tortured]
[and more than a million were killed] under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime.]
[More than a million Cambodians fled and became refugees.]
From 1975 to 1979,
there's the Khmer Rouge ran by Pol Pot.
At that time I was 10 years old,
I still remember when they tortured...
a lot of people dying by starving and sickness...
most of them were killing people.
That was a hard time
and that was the worst thing that happened in the world.
Most Cambodians escaped from the war in 1981after the Khmer Rouge regime,
and when they started to come here,
people don't speak that much English,
so that's why they started working at donut shops
because most of them what they do are family business --
This is my wife's nephew.
He just came to the United States last year.
He came in a special case they call "Lottery Visa".
He's a lucky one that won a lottery green card.
The business we just opened-- it is kind of slow, it's brand new.
Hopefully, we can own it for a long time until we get...
you know, some profit...
to take care of my family, my kid...
go to school, go to college...
I have a beautiful kid.
It's like, if you work for a company,
you have a different schedule than the donut people.
The donut people, we wake up at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning,
and we'll be done by 12:00 or 1:00 o'clock and take a couple-of-hours-nap
and, you know, get together and then,
go to sleep, and wake up, and go to make some more donuts!
(man singing Karaoke in Cambodian)
[Tao Ngo Vietnamese Restaurant North Houston]
[Cambodian Karaoke Party]
(end of singing)
Yeah, we like to get together because, you know,
we work seven days a week.
You know, some wake up at one,
some of us wake up at two,
some of us at three...
and we work seven days a week,
you know, this is the only fun that we have.
(Cambodian music)
I would say 95% of the donut shops in Texas, not just in Houston,
in Texas is Cambodian-people-owned.
One one-big -family, that's all.
(Cambodian music)
[Second Generation Donut Shop Owner]
[Roth's parents, sisters, aunts,]
[and uncles all own donut shops.]
My parents bought the store in 1994.
They would always bring us on weekends because we have school on weekdays.
I really dread waking up on the weekend just to come make donut, you know.
They told me one day I'm going to own my business
and I kind of say I didn't want to do this.
This is not my first choice of what I really wanted to do.
For me, going to school what I really wanted to do,
I wanted to experience that life.
One day I woke up and I realized I didn't want to work for somebody else.
I called my mom and I told her I wanted to come back home
and try this again,
and she was very excited, very happy for me
that I can kind of woke up and I wanted to do this.
I get up at 4:00 am,
and my sisters get up at around 2 - 2:30 am,
they're closer to the plant so they wake up earlier,
to go to the plant and--
I'm fortunately to have a little bit of both,
so I can stay in bed a little longer and they can--
So when I first got to Houston I didn't know--
I thought my family was the only one that was doing donuts
but I come to find out that
a lot of Cambodian people have done this way before we have...
You know, it's like a community of helping out each other, you know,
like, people were telling each other what can make you successful
and I don't think anybody was envious of each other,
just wanted to see our culture succeed,
and the donut business is where it started
for a lot of these Cambodian cultures.
It's definitely a dream
that a lot of people want when they are in Cambodia,
to have their own place, back in Cambodia.
It's a fast-pace life.
Every day is a struggle to find money and food for the family.
It made me realized what I have out here in America.
As hard as I work down here,
I think that they work harder over there to make a small living.
My first place when I came,
are the one along with Donald's Donut on el Dorado in Webster.
Then I preach it out to Yankee Doodle Donuts.
And that's when I met David on the El Dorado store.
I was teaching him since he was young.
I taught him probably about five years, I believe.
[Houston coffee entrepreneur.]
[Spent high school with Sam & Roth working in the Ouch family donut shop.]
(David Buehrer) My name is David Buehrer and this is Morningstar.
(Uncle Sam) Most of the time I don't ask for help, you know.
It surprises me it came up from David
just to ask me to get into a business partnership with him.
(David B.) This is the first I'd learned with--
when I was in high school was how to roll kolaches
and Sam's family they would let me roll a kolache
and they would immediately unroll the kolache,
and then they would roll it again to make sure it was perfect.
And for like the first three or four months of me working there
they never served any of my kolaches. (chuckles)
One day they just saw one of them and decided it was okay,
and from then on, they let me roll kolaches for them.
But it took like months
before they even serve one of the kolaches that I rolled.
It shows the attention to details on level of quality
and maybe, I just needed to learn more,
but it took months to roll the kolaches with them.
(David B.) One of the things we wanted to do with Morningtar
is bring in the technique that we learned from the Cambodian donut shops
and apply it to the foodie nature that specialty copy exists in.
We have a lot of bartenders, and chefs, and sommelier friends,
and a lot of our donuts are inspired by them.
Yeah, at one point in high school I was driving at two in the morning
to go and learn how to make donuts in Magnolia, Texas, with Sam.
And then, an hour back, and then go to school by 7:30, so...
but you do what you gotta do to learn.
(Sam P.) In the nineties, you know,
that's when the donuts started here in Houston by the Cambodian community
to now is a long time to me...
You feel like it needs change, it needs some time to change.
(Sam P.) And then, all of a sudden one day,
he called me pou, which is Cambodian for uncle,
and said, "Would you like to do a donut shop and a coffee together?",
I said, "Sure", but, you know, I never expected it.
In the future, you know,
the new generations they know that I own the store
and they want to do something like this.
I don't want to do the same thing every day, you know.
Especially, because I've been doing it for almost 20 years.
You're doing the same thing every day,
and to me, I wouldn't want to go back and do the same shop
like a mom-and-pop shop.
This is the shop that I want to do as the next one...
And the next one, and the next one...
People have no idea what goes into a single donut here.
English subtitles by Jenny Lam-Chowdhury