Our Hen House

Time to Make the Vegan Donuts

Posted on 26. Jan, 2010 by Jasmin Singer in Grazing in the Grassroots, Money Squawks

As part of my eating tour of Portland, I (of course) stopped at the amazing VooDoo Doughnut (“the magic is in the hole”). Directly next to a strip club, and in an area that made this long-time New Yorker tightly grasp onto my wallet in my coat pocket, VooDoo Doughnut is a world-famous (well, okay, maybe just really well-known in certain circles) place, which, in addition to the “regular” (oppressed) variety of doughnuts, has a huge selection of vegan ones, too.

And they are like none other. I’d kind-of like to equate them to the Dunkin’ Donuts that I used to eat when I was a kid growing up in central Jersey (not too much more to do there besides go to DD and go bowling), since they are sugary and frosting-y and just over a dollar (!); but they are better than that. I had the “Portland Crème,” which, it should be noted, had really-a-lot-of-crème, chocolate frosting, and just a tiny bit of god.

Lots of doughnut-craving vegans go to VooDoo Doughnuts. We also go to Mighty-o (totally vegan selection) in Seattle or Ronald’s (mostly vegan selection) in Las Vegan…I mean Vegas. (The ones at Ronald’s, by the way, made me a better person. I left so elated that the money I lost in the casinos was all-but-forgotten.)

VooDoo fits within our “restaurant within a restaurant” idea, which can be boiled down to this: If you are already in the non-vegan restaurant business, why not incorporate vegan options onto the menu, effectively creating a restaurant within a restaurant?

Or, if you have a stubborn “I’m-not- going-to a vegan-restaurant, dammit” family, you can take the curmudgeons to a restaurant within a restaurant, order the best thing on the menu, and let everyone have a bite. Or, better yet, encourage them to get chicken parm – just don’t mention that the “chicken” and “parm” are made of soy. Heh.

By the way, the impactful animal advocacy group, Compassion Over Killing, currently has a campaign asking Dunkin Donuts to take out the eggs and dairy.