Sugar-crazed New Yorkers are willing to wait indefinitely for a taste of these treats.
The Filipino-inspired Kora bakery was started out of a Woodside, Queens, apartment in the summer of 2020 after chef Kimberly Camara and her partner, Kevin Borja, found themselves out of work following the onslaught of COVID-19.
Intended as a temporary endeavor, the venture has since evolved into a wildly popular, five-person staffed company with what was at one point a 10,000-person waiting list.
“When we started Kora we had no intention of turning it into a full-blown business,” Camara, who trained at the Culinary Institute of America, told the Guardian. “It was something that we thought would just be a seasonal project, something that maybe we would start and end in a couple of months during the summer of 2020. We kind of just went with the flow.”
Initially, family and friends helped them deliver the doughnuts — signature sweets include a leche flan creation consisting of brioche dough with a flan center and a shiny blob made of the purple yam dish ube — but soon demand forced them to expand.
After temporarily closing the waiting list, they’ve since managed to halve it to a still obscene 5,000 people. And orders are once again closed, this time for both catchup purposes and the holidays, with plans to reopen in the new year on Jan. 10. Camara attributes Kora’s long waiting list to more than just the tasty recipes.
“It’s really about the connection that we’ve been able to make with people through the doughnuts,” she said. “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.”
In addition to catching up with backorders, the couple are also now working on getting a brick-and-mortar space for Kora, which currently operates through online orders and has over 39,000 followers on Instagram.
For Camara, Kora’s success has been deeply fulfilling: Her ability to share her recipes — many of them inspired by her late grandmother Kora’s own cookbook has been creatively and professionally self-actualizing.
“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. “Wherever Kora takes us, behind all of it is my connection with her and my connection with my heritage.”