Kora Bakery Makes Filipino Doughnuts That New York Has Fallen In Love With

Filipino restaurants are a familiar part of the New York scene, but it’s always great to see Filipino flavors impress the normally blasé New Yorkers. Kimberly Camara’s Filipino doughnuts inspired so much interest that she now has an 800-person waitlist. 

Camara, a former commis chef at Eleven Madison Park, opened her first online store, Kora Bakery, after her catering company, Union Square Hospitality Group, shut down last March due to the pandemic. 2,000 employees were laid off, and Camara was one of them. You might say Kora Bakery has been an unprecedented success. 

Her doughnuts are unique and special. Every doughnut has Filipino-themed fillings made of a pastry creme base and a whole Filipino ingredient, not just an extract. Popular flavors include champorado, pinipig, leche flan and ube. The glazes are made with condensed milk and sugar. Camara posts a Google form on Instagram every Monday at 3 p.m., and the doughnuts are available for pickup every Friday. 

She now sells 275 doughnuts a week, with a waitlist of 800 hungry customers and growing, proving there really is a demand for Filipino flavors in New York. Who can blame them? Her doughnuts are beautiful, complex and in such intriguing flavors as salted egg, turon, sans rival.

Kora Bakery is named after Camara’s late grandmother, Corazon, whose recipes she discovered recently. The idea for the doughnuts was serendipity at work. Camara had been just finished a birthday cake and had leftover dough and extra ube filling, so she decided to fill her dough with ube and fry it. And voila, her first product — the ube doughnut — was born. 

“I knew ube was one of those gateway flavors that people like to buy. But what’s going to make these doughnuts special is once I start bringing in all the other Filipino flavors,” she told Eater.com in an interview. 

Camara won’t be limiting her talents to doughnuts, though, but will expand her menu and may even include savory items. We’ll wait and see. 

For more information, visit @fromkora on Instagram