Purple Dough, Woodside, Queens
Location: 38–05 69th St, Woodside
How to Order: Takeout or pickup only, 12–7:00; text 646–726–2137 or order on GrubHub, UberEats, Postmates, etc.
My order: Ube donut ice cream sandwich with vanilla ice cream, coconut pandan donut, mango donut with glaze topping
Cost: $25.93 with $10 tip and various Seamless fees
The Woodside-Sunnyside-Jackson Heights area of Queens is food paradise. Within a 10 block radius you can find NYC’s best Thai food, best taco, best halal cart, and best supermarket. You can get street elote grilled in a shopping cart and you can grab superb Tibetan dumplings from a kiosk in the back of a cell phone store. And that’s just scratching the surface!
Cool, but are there donuts? Yes! My favorite so far is Purple Dough, an exciting Filipino American shop that is deliciously expanding the range of the classic donut.
To start with, there is an ube donut ice cream sandwich! Available only on the weekends, this is just what you think and hope it is: ice cream sandwiched between two bright purple ube donuts.
Ube is a naturally purple yam that is essential to Filipino deserts from ice cream to jelly to cake and now donuts. It’s sweet but not over the top and, in its cake donut form, went very well with the glaze and coconut on top. It was also nice and sticky, which helped hold the whole tower together. I should add that Purple Dough’s cake donuts are baked instead of fried. (Gatekeeping purist sticklers might say these are not donuts, but donut-shaped cupcakes.) I worried that this type of donut would be too crumbly to work as a sandwich, but it held together very nicely.
Of course, when you make an ice cream sandwich out of donuts — donuts of course being notable for having, like, holes in their centers— there are some structural integrity concerns. Some ice cream is going to squeeze out of this. But what do you care? Are you eating a donut ice cream sandwich in a microchip clean room? The lord made napkins for a reason. There’s a reason why your fingers can fit in your mouth.
(Also, this is not NYC Ice Cream Report!! but a quick note on that. The ice cream was very good: thick and creamy, as though the product of happy cows, without that chemical aftertaste you get from supermarket vanilla ice cream. If you don’t want vanilla, they offer at least a dozen other flavors.)
Next up was coconut pandan. I struggled for a while to describe pandan until Google told me that Saveur magazine called the plant “the vanilla of Southeast Asia.” It’s like vanilla if vanilla was a fine wine. It’s vanilla plus a bunch of “notes” that won’t make sense until you try it. The result was the kind of donut where you take your first bite and you close your eyes and the rest of the world kind of falls away.
(Pandan goes with coconut in things besides this donut, for example in kaya jam, which is the key ingredient in an amazing breakfast food called kaya toast. If you love donuts, you’ll want to know about kaya toast: it’s a sandwich of toasted white bread, kaya jam, and a thin slab of cold butter. Look for it. You can get it at Kopitiam on the Lower East Side.)
Finally, the mango donut. I was skeptical of this one before I tried it. Mangoes are delicious because they have a specific texture and juiciness that is very far away from the texture and moisture level of a cake donut. I didn’t think they could pull it off, but I was very wrong. There’s a glaze on this donut that is somehow actually juicy. I don’t know what laws of nature were broken to achieve this but it was well worth it.
Okay, so obviously you want a donut ice cream sandwich and you didn’t need to read any of this to know that you do. But in today’s world of pickup and delivery only, if you come all the way out to Queens, where are you going to eat this? You’ll need to eat it right away. And for so many health and safety reasons, you won’t be licking donut glaze and ice cream off your fingers on a bumpy 7 train.
The closest option is the parking lot of the enormous church across the street, a converted warehouse emblazoned with the words Jesucristo es el Señor. You may not want to do this. You’ll be exposed to the sun (fun fact: sunlight melts ice cream) and the constant rattling of the 7 train on the elevated tracks on Roosevelt Avenue. There is a playground a few blocks up 69th Street, but it is closed during the crisis (and is too close to the BQE exit ramps anyway).
Your best option is to head to Travers Park in Jackson Heights and set up camp at one of the nice tables there. The park can be distressingly crowded during the pandemic but the tables are spaced at least six feet apart. Once you’ve claimed your spot, you could spend the afternoon having tacos and momos and donuts delivered to you. Be sure to ask for extra napkins!
