I’m Donut ? and the Allure of the International Chain

I’m Donut ?, a Japanese bakery chain known for its viral popularity and its curiously punctuated name, opened earlier this year in a sleek Times Square storefront. The company’s specialty is the nama doughnut (the word, in Japanese, means “raw,” or “fresh”), an impossibly moist and light cumulus of starch and sugar that seems captured by gravity thanks only to the marginal heft of various frostings, icings, and fillings. This textural sorcery is achieved by way of a proprietary yeasted dough whose recipe involves, among other things, kabocha squash, which introduces a bit of earthy sweetness and gives the interiors a sunny yellow hue. The brand’s “original” doughnut, a sugar-dusted, circular pillow without a hole in the center, is something of a miracle—breathy, yeasty, tender, and warm, it was the dream doughnut I didn’t realize I had always yearned for.

These miracles don’t come without sacrifice—of one’s time, mostly, but also of one’s money, since the more ambitiously stuffed and decorated selections can exceed ten dollars apiece. Still, the New York location of I’m Donut ? is a bona-fide sensation, even months after its début. The shop, aggressively minimal, with a soaring blank-white façade that evokes the attenuated minimalism of an Apple Store, is the chain’s first outside of Japan, where the brand originated in 2022. Depending on the day, the time, and the weather, you might waltz right in or join a snaking queue of a hundred people alternately wondering if the wait is worth it, gazing up at the “Oh, Mary!” marquee across the street, and enthusiastically filming vertical videos about the phenomenon of the line itself.

You should get the original doughnut, of course, not just for its own virtues but as a control. There are chocolate and matcha variants, their subtle flavors baked into the dough. Then there are filled doughnuts, whose puffy centers are pumped with flavored creams, all of them vivid and none too sweet: custard, more matcha, fragrant sake gelée with Chantilly, airy peanut-butter cream swirled with tart Concord-grape jelly. There are some New York-exclusive flavors, like a ring doughnut glazed in neon-pink strawberry icing, freckled with bits of freeze-dried berry that crackle and melt on the tongue, or a chocolate variety with a caramel-espresso cream filling that was unexpectedly, thrillingly bitter and complex. The somewhat controversial scrambled-egg doughnut features a sugary original doughnut piped full of soft curds and a squirt of a sweet-savory tomato mayonnaise—a bold and bizarre breakfast manifesto that refuses to be definitively sweet or definitively savory. I loved it unreservedly, though I imagine I might be in the minority.

I’m Donut ? doughnuts are, in short, excellent, but, as with so many places that achieve extraordinary viral velocity, what the store is really selling is the experience of experience, the novelty of novelty. Call it hype as infrastructure: the stanchions corralling the line outside, the security guard at the door, the smiling employees walking up and down the queue, handing out checklist-style paper menus to speed the flow of orders. This is far from the first international chain to open in the city, but it’s one of the few that’s broken through to become genuinely hot while maintaining considerable good will.