In Praise of Krispy Kreme, My Ultimate Destination Wedding Venue

How one editor’s obsession with Krispy Kreme led her to fantasize about nuptials at the North Carolina chain.

“If you had to get married in a chain restaurant, which one would it be?”

My former college roommate posed this question on a road trip that had entered into hour three. We’d long passed Delaware and small talk, and were now wading into “what if” scenarios. My friends laughed.

“That’s crazy!” one replied

“I need to think about it,” said another.

But I had my answer ready: “At Krispy Kreme, saying my vows under the hot doughnuts sign.”

A year earlier, I’d married my favorite person on earth in an elegant, rustic setting. The ceremony was held outside, with tidy rows of white chairs marking out an alfresco chapel. The reception was inside a farmhouse. Peonies topped every surface. Little pewter table numbers organized guests. Champagne bubbled in every fluted glass. It was possibly the most sophisticated moment of my life.

But afterward, I questioned everything but the groom. Why oh why didn’t Krispy Kreme occur to me earlier?

My first Krispy was in Virginia along Route 1. It still sits in a dip in the road between two hills, the midway point of a roller coaster ride. What I remember most isn’t the retro stool seating or the polka-dotted branding, it’s the illuminated “hot doughnuts” sign, lit at night like a vacancy sign at a cheap honeymoon motel. When that signal was on, it was impossible not to swerve my beat-up Volvo into the turning lane. Those doughnuts were part of my report card celebrations and my post-breakup sulks.

I was an easy target: a hormonal, hungry teen who had the appetite to demolish a tub of ice cream. From my first bite of Krispy Kreme’s chocolate iced glaze, I was a believer. Fresh from the oven, shellacked in sugar, and topped in a cap of chocolate, they made me want to write romantic sonnets. Years later, I was still swooning.

As far as I know, there’s only one couple that actually had their wedding at a Krispy Kreme: Sarah Daniel and Kiran Skariah of New South Wales, Australia. Sarah was a student working in the local Krispy who got flirty with Kiran over his usual order, white hot chocolate. They celebrated every subsequent dating anniversary at the venue, so when they got married, they decided to hold the reception there in 2016. 

The wedding was covered by The Sun under the headline “I Dough!” I read about it with the sort of stabbing, hyper-focused jealousy typically associated with stalking an ex on Facebook. The bride was a vision of matrimonial loveliness in white lace standing under an awning that read “Doughnuts & Coffee.” The photo—the caption called them the “sweet-toothed pair”—showed them in a booth, smugly snuggling up in their wedding finery, a glazed doughnut between them. Despite all this, though, they seemed entirely undeserving. I mean, white hot chocolate? That was what brought them together? Not a chocolate iced or even a cruller?

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But there’s another nuptial I like to picture: the wedding of Vernon Rudolph, founder of Krispy Kreme, and Ruth Ayers. Their wedding took place in 1939, two years after the company was founded. I imagine Ruth in a Meghan Markle-esque dress, a long-sleeved silk gown edged in ivory buttons, topped with a lace veil streaming to the floor like an embroidered waterfall. Did Vernon carry her over the Krispy threshold? Did they feed each other glazed doughnuts? Did they hold the ceremony under the “hot” light?

The last question I know to be pure fantasy. Although this light seems to be part of the company’s lore since its inception, the first beacon didn’t go up until the ’90s. But the hot light drives customers into a mania and the company embraces it. The company’s app is fully built around tracking illuminated signs as they flash up, essentially acting as a Tinder for hot doughnut hookups. 

And the fact is, its cold doughnuts are delicious but mundane. Yet warm, they’re ambrosia on a conveyor belt. Quite simply, hot doughnuts are hard to get. And as anyone who’s been put through the wringer of love will tell you, when someone plays hard to get, it breeds deep obsessiveness.

Six years after that road trip, I wanted to confess to my husband at last how much I was pining for a do-over wedding at Krispy Kreme, even long after our ceremony. Our conversation wasn’t what I expected.

I turned to him and asked, “Do you ever look back on our wedding and wish we got married in—”

“Legoland?” he said.

Apparently, my husband had his own adolescent dream that our traditional wedding hadn’t met. And that’s when we began plotting our future anniversaries at Krispy Kreme. And Legoland. After all, marriage is about compromise.

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