Filipino-inspired bakery Kora has gone from a pandemic side-hustle to a New York sensation, with 10,000 people on the waitlist for the bakery’s doughnuts.

What started as a small-time, online-only bakery founded during the pandemic from a couple’s kitchen in Queens, has quickly become a hot commodity.

The sudden craze for Kora has been compared to the iconic Magnolia bakery’s cupcakes, and the ‘cronut’ obsession of 2013 that led to purchase limits of two per person.

Chef Kimberly Camara and her partner Kevin Borja starting making doughnuts after losing their hospitality jobs when coronavirus swept through the city.

“When we started Kora we had no intention of turning it into a full-blown business,” Camara 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.”

Now, the business boasts a team of five and an industrial kitchen to help deliver on a waitlist that recently hit 10,000 people. The team was forced to stop taking orders as they worked through the backlog, which now stands at around 5,000.

One of Kora’s signature delights is their leche flan donut, made from brioche dough and crowned with a circle of Camara’s grandmother’s leche flan.

The couple also experiment with bold colours and flavours, from their bright and glossy purple Ube doughnut to the lime-green avocado flavoured abokado con yelo.