New York City’s latest sell-out food hit: the deep-fried 'cronut'

The current vogue is for a bit of deep-fried pastry

New York is always caught up in some food trend or other. It seems to be a constitutional requirement. There was the ramen craze of ’04, when Momofuku’s David Chang looked like he was about to be beatified. Cupcakes came and conquered in ’06, of course, and then came the fast-moving food-truck trend of 2009. The current vogue is for a bit of deep-fried pastry.

Since 10 May, the only word on fooderati’s lips has been a particularly ugly one: the cronut. The $5 confection, an iced doughnut made from deep-fried croissant pastry filled with cream and covered in sugar, has caused people to queue round the block of French pâtisserie chef Dominique Ansel’s bakery in SoHo, New York.

There have been scuffles over them. There have been 6am queues and a six-cronut limit per person imposed. Ansel has had to tweet his followers: “It is not okay to flip off our baristas because we are out of cronuts. Wtf!” And CNN’s Mr New York, Anderson Cooper, was even denied special access to the sugary treats (can this really be New York?!?). Makes you sort of long for the days when foraging was cool, doesn’t it?