I could have written a comment on Raymond's blog about his dis of Krispy Kreme, but then I thought I'd write a full fledged entry. He says:

I don't understand the appeal of KK donuts. They have no flavor; it's just sugar.

...and with that, Raymond proves that he did not grow up in the South. First, it is a maxim of Southern cooking that anything that tastes good with sugar will taste even better with lots more sugar. Case in point: iced tea. Frankly, I don't know how the rest of the world manages to drink tea without a ton of sugar dumped in it. My mom's recipe for iced tea? Make about a quart of tea and then dump in 3/4 a cup of sugar. Sure, what you get tastes more like sugar water than tea, but that's the point. Southerners would pour raw granulated sugar down their throats if their stomachs could handle it... Which, now that I think about it, may explain Krispy Kremes...

Of course, the reality is that my opinions of Krispy Kremes, like Raymond's opinions of Dunkin Donuts, have been bred in. Growing up in North Carolina, home of Krispy Kreme, I've been eating those suckers since I was a kid. Nothing says “home” like Krispy Kreme, which is why the KK stores opening up in the Pacific Northwest have induced a kind of cognitive dissonance every time I drive by them. (It's also weird to see stores that are so new... I'm more used to stores that are so old my parents went to them as kids. I also think those older machines make better doughnuts, but I could be wrong on that.) Now if we could just get a damn Chick-Fil-A franchise opened up in Seattle, I'd never have to go home to see my parents again!

I will have to admit, though, that Seattlites were totally out of control when the first KK opened in Issaquah. There were, like, hour long lines at 4 in the morning. People would ask me, when they found out I was from a state that already had Krispy Kremes, “are they really that good?” My answer was always: “They're really good but, hey, they're still just doughnuts.”

(I will add that my parents are safe - I'll continue to visit them until Bullock's Bar B Que starts licensing franchises! Mmmmm.... hush puppies...)