A new sweets shop has touched a raw nerve.
New Yorkers are lining up for hours at Cookie DO NYC (550 La Guardia Place, 646-892-3600), a Greenwich Village quasi-bakery that opened in late January and sells scoops of cookie dough in more than a dozen flavors.
“This is like a dream,” says Brayan Murillo, 20, a student and self-described “cookie-dough fanatic” living in Woodside. “Once I heard about this . . . I had to come here, like, as soon as I could.”
Murillo waited for an hour Wednesday for a scoop of cake batter, one of the best-selling flavors, along with chocolate chip. Though he’s not usually one to happily stand in line, he insists it was worth it.
“I’m coming back,” he says. “Either Saturday or Sunday.”
The shop offers scoops ($4 for a single) of 13 classic cookie flavors, including fluffernutter, as well as seasonal confections, such as cinnamon-brown sugar, and gluten-free and vegan options. The dough is made with pasteurized eggs and heat-treated flour, making it safe to eat raw but also engineered for baking.
“You can eat it and not feel sick afterwards. It’s a whole other level,” says Haley Carter Chapel, 25, a trapeze instructor from The Bronx. “They said it can last 30 days in your freezer. I was like, ‘A month of reserves for bad nights and bad mornings? And lady time? Girl, yeah!’”
Other menu items include cookie-dough milkshakes ($9) and bars of fudge with chunks of the sweet stuff ($3).
The shop’s founder, Kristen Tomlan, 28, toyed for years with the idea of selling cookie dough.
“I always thought it was a good idea,” says Tomlan, who has no professional culinary training but grew up with a cookbook-author mother in St. Louis.
In 2014, an allergic reaction to an antibiotic led to a life-threatening infection that left her in a medically induced coma for three weeks, just a couple of months before her wedding.
When she recovered, she decided to go for it.
“I almost lost my life [and thought], ‘This is kind of the time for me to follow my dreams,’” she says.
I almost lost my life [and thought], ‘This is kind of the time for me to follow my dreams.’
She launched DO as a mail-order business in early 2015 and was soon selling enough, thanks to early endorsements from Glamour and Refinery 29, to keep her up cooking until 4 a.m. She and her husband had to rearrange the furniture in their Brooklyn Heights apartment to accommodate commercial freezers.
A few months in, she quit her job in branding and design to focus solely on the business.
Now, the brick-and-mortar shop is an instant hit, with people lining up before the store opens at 10 a.m. and waiting for more than two hours on the weekend. The shop makes 1,200 pounds of dough a day but still regularly runs out of the most popular flavors.
Tomlan says she isn’t all that surprised by the city’s hunger for the raw stuff.
“There’s something nostalgic about it,” she says. “I always thought it could be the next big thing.”
Additional reporting by Hannah Sparks
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