Here Is the Glorious Cheese‑Covered Krispy Kreme of Your Dreams
Here Is the Glorious Cheese‑Covered Krispy Kreme of Your Dreams
Donuts in Bangkok
To travel thousands of miles and eat a Krispy Kreme donut for breakfast—at the mall, of all places—felt almost embarrassing. I can’t count how many Krispy Kreme donuts I’ve eaten in my life, and I don’t think I want to know. But I’d never had a donut covered with grated cheese. That’s how I found myself ordering a “Butter Cheese” donut at the fanciest mall I’ve ever seen, a gleaming white complex decorated with lush greenery on Bangkok’s Sukhumvit Road.
The outside of the EmQuartier mall looks like a swirling Apple Store, except for the waterfall decorated with peacocks. Approach from the SkyTrain station, and you’ll walk in on a red carpet. I was street-level and sweaty. I was here because a blast of air conditioning had whisked me off the street. Now, I was standing in the food court, staring at a familiar donut display case.
The “Butter Cheese” donut came on a plate, with a small silver fork. It was early enough that there was no one around to judge me for eating a donut, with a fork, at the mall, in a city of spectacular street food. There was also no one but me to appreciate that this donut was covered in cheese. The stiff shavings looked like they belonged on a frozen pizza. I took a bite.
Butter and cheese taste surprisingly neutral. I was glad I tried it, but it looked more interesting than it tasted. What I appreciated more was air conditioning, so I spent the rest of the day at the mall, wandering from the grocery store to the rooftop garden. It’s just too hot to hang out elsewhere, agreed two students I met on a patio facing the waterfall.
“You don’t have much to do, if you don’t go to the malls!” one of them said. “You have school all day, and then if you want to watch a movie, look around, do some shopping, eat, chill, whatever…you go to the mall.”
“You wouldn’t, like, go to the park to chill, because it’s too hot,” her friend explained. They looked at each other. “Yeah, we basically just live in the mall.”
I soon replaced Krispy Kreme with the little balls of fried dough sold by street vendors. But I kept going back to the malls. In steaming hot Bangkok, malls function like a network of air-conditioned oases that could cool and entertain you for days. It’s not just air conditioning I was after, though. Travel guides encourage you to “get lost” exploring a new city, but I think it’s good to know that you can also “get lost” at the mall. Literally, if you’re in one of Bangkok’s sprawling mega malls.
Here, there are malls for vitamins and cheap cell phones. And there are malls for Louis Vuitton and Prada. There are food courts and restaurants and movie theaters at the mall, but also gardens, ice skating rinks, and aquariums. There’s also an airport-themed mall, where each floor represents a city, and San Francisco inexplicably gets two floors. That week, I went to all of them, got lost, and loved it.