Why Voodoo Doughnut matters.
Voodoo Doughnut is a vivacious doughnut shop where Melrose Avenue's pop-cultural energy meets a Portland counterculture brand built around theatrical pastry, rebellious humor and deliberately unconventional flavor combinations.
Set along Melrose Avenue at La Brea Avenue and just south of the Hollywood Media District, the shop occupies a prominent corner between fashion storefronts, production businesses and the commercial corridor running west toward Fairfax Avenue. A saturated pink exterior makes the single-story building immediately legible against the surrounding streetscape. Spinning display cases turn dozens of individually decorated doughnuts into the interior's principal visual feature, extending the brand's maximalist presentation beyond its packaging. Black-velvet artwork and eccentric decorative objects carry the theatrical treatment deeper into the room. The result is a conspicuous corner bakery whose color, moving displays and graphic ornament translate Voodoo's Portland-born visual language into the commercial performance of Melrose Avenue.
What defines Voodoo Doughnut.
Voodoo Doughnut is best known for Kenneth “Cat Daddy” Pogson and Tres Shannon turning their backgrounds in Portland's music and nightlife scene into a doughnut company that treated pastry as countercultural entertainment. Shannon had operated the X-Ray Cafe, an influential all-ages Portland music venue, before the longtime friends began discussing a joint business 2000 and discovered that Downtown Portland lacked a doughnut shop. Neither founder knew how to make doughnuts, so they traveled to Pico Rivera, California, for a three-day training course before renting a small storefront between two Old Town nightclubs and opening on May 30, 2003. Early experimentation pushed breakfast cereal, candy, Tang and bacon into preparations that quickly separated the business from conventional doughnut shops, and national media attention arrived within its first month. Anthony Bourdain brought the shop to a much wider audience through No Reservations in 2007, featuring the Bacon Maple Bar during the program's Portland episode. The Portland Crème acquired civic significance the following year when Portland City Council declared it the city's official doughnut on December 24, 2008. Expansion proceeded deliberately through a second Portland shop that year, Eugene in 2010, Denver in 2013 and Austin in 2015 before Voodoo entered Southern California through Universal CityWalk in 2017. Chris Schultz became chief executive officer in January 2018 after senior operational roles with Starbucks and MOD Pizza, beginning a new expansion period that eventually carried the company into numerous American markets. The Melrose shop opened on April 1, 2025 as Voodoo's first conventional Los Angeles street location, producing a projected 5,000 doughnuts on opening day and directing part of its inaugural sales toward the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation following that year's destructive wildfires.
The Voodoo Doll turns a raised yeast doughnut into the company's clearest edible emblem by filling the figure with raspberry jelly, coating its upper surface in chocolate frosting and driving a pretzel stake through its center, with individual decoration changing the character of each figure. Bacon Maple Bar works through a simpler contrast, laying strips of salty bacon across maple frosting on an elongated raised doughnut so smoke, salt, sugar and soft fried dough register in direct succession. Grape Ape pushes farther from traditional bakery flavor through vanilla frosting, powdered grape flavor and lavender sprinkles, pairing confectionery fruit intensity with a floral finish. Oh Captain, My Captain converts breakfast cereal into texture by pressing Cap'n Crunch over vanilla frosting, and Dirt performs a darker variation by breaking chocolate cream-filled cookies across another vanilla-frosted raised doughnut. Portland Cream changes both construction and symbolism through a yeast shell filled with Bavarian cream, capped in chocolate and finished with two frosting eyes associated with the founders' vision of Portland. Vegan versions extend several of these signatures through plant-based doughs and fillings, including Voodoo Doll and Portland Cream, preserving their visual constructions across a separate production line. The Melrose counter consequently demonstrates the founding premise through the pastries themselves: recognizable raised, cake and filled doughnuts become platforms for bacon, cereal, powdered candy flavors, cookies, sculptural decoration and comic imagery.
How Voodoo Doughnut fits.
Voodoo Doughnut works as the anchor for a Central Los Angeles outing connecting a studio whose backlot shaped decades of American television, an Art Deco broadcasting complex built during radio's ascendancy and a cemetery where the entertainment industry's institutional history is written directly into the landscape.
Begin at Television City, the broadcasting complex CBS opened in 1952 on the former Gilmore Stadium property at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. Pereira & Luckman designed the facility around flexible production stages and a stark black-and-white exterior accented by red, making the building an unusually direct architectural statement about the emerging television industry. The Price Is Right, The Carol Burnett Show, All in the Family and numerous other programs were produced there across subsequent decades. Hackman Capital Partners acquired the property from CBS in 2019 for $750 million, beginning another chapter for a site whose stages have remained embedded in Los Angeles television production. Continue to CBS Columbia Square, completed in 1938 at Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street as the network's West Coast broadcasting headquarters. Architect William Lescaze brought International Style modernism to the complex through horizontal massing, ribbon windows and restrained surfaces that departed sharply from the theatrical historicism prevalent in Hollywood. The opening broadcast assembled Cecil B. DeMille, Al Jolson, Edward G. Robinson and other major entertainment figures, signaling radio's institutional power before television displaced it as the dominant domestic medium. Columbia Records later maintained offices and recording facilities there, extending the complex from broadcasting into recorded music. Conclude at Hollywood Forever, founded in 1899 as Hollywood Memorial Park before the surrounding district became synonymous with the motion-picture business. Paramount Pictures eventually developed along its southern boundary, placing studio production beside the burial ground of figures including Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, Judy Garland and Rudolph Valentino. The cemetery entered severe decline late in the twentieth century before Tyler Cassity acquired it in 1998, restored its grounds and adopted the Hollywood Forever name. Film screenings and cultural programming subsequently returned public activity to a property whose monuments preserve more than a century of Los Angeles entertainment history. The progression moves from purpose-built television production through modernist radio infrastructure and culminates in a burial ground where the people who constructed Hollywood's film culture became part of its permanent physical record.
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