Story at a glance
- Kora, a Filipino-inspired doughnut shop in Queens, N.Y., is the city’s newest obsession.
- Treats on the menu include a glossy purple ube doughnut and a doughnut stuffed with an entire flan.
- Camara said she didn’t intend for her business to take off the way it has, and the project originally started as a short-term operation when she and her partner lost their jobs at a New York hospitality group during pandemic shutdowns.
A New York doughnut shop has taken the city by storm, recently boasting a waiting list of 10,000 preorders for the Filipino-inspired desserts.
Kora, named for shop owner and chef Kimberly Camara’s grandmother, largely centers around the founder’s closeness to her South Asian roots.
“Kora is the coming together of my entire life. There is no way that my grandmother is looking down on us and isn’t so proud of all of the work that we’ve done,” Camara told Eater this week. “Wherever Kora takes us, behind all of it is my connection with her and my connection with my heritage.”
“The leche flan recipe is from my grandmother’s cookbook that I found after she passed away,” she added, referring to one of the shop’s most iconic doughnuts: a fried brioche dough stuffed with an entire flan.
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Other popular items include a glossy purple ube doughnut, which uses frozen ube Camara flies in from the Philippines.
Kora’s unique flavors have attracted thousands of visitors to the Queens, N.Y., bakery, and the shop recently closed its waiting list when it hit 10,000 new online orders.
The waitlist currently sits at around 5,000, Camara said, and orders are set to reopen on Jan. 10, according to the bakery’s Instagram page, which has more than 39,000 followers.
Camara launched business in the summer of 2020 with her partner, Kevin Borja, after the pair lost their jobs at a hospitality group when New York was shuttered by the pandemic. For the first few months, the doughnuts were made in Camara’s Woodside, Queens apartment.
They at first relied on friends and family to help deliver orders around the city, but have since brought on more staff and moved the operation to an industrial kitchen.
“When we started Kora we had no intention of turning it into a full-blown business,” Camara said. “We kind of just went with the flow.”
She added: “It’s really about the connection that we’ve been able to make with people through the doughnuts. Whether it’s through nostalgia, storytelling – people can relate to a lot of the stories that I would tell regarding how I came up with certain flavors and brought them to life through a doughnut.”
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