Dough Loco From Corey Cova Upper East Side | Tasting Table NYC

Chef Corey Cova is the most delicious kind of pragmatist.

When the 27-year-old sees a gaping deficiency in the Upper East Side food scene, he just opens something smart to fill the void.

He did it with beer and gonzo grub at Earl's Beer & Cheese and created a crucial neighborhood spot for wine and dinner at ABV.

Corey Cova | A rainbow of glazes
Now he's done it again with doughnuts that are as brightly flavored as they are colorfully attractive and Blue Bottle Coffee at Dough Loco.

No matter that the last time Cova made doughnuts was "as part of a three-week baking unit at the Culinary Institute of America"; over the last couple of months, Cova has enrolled himself in a rigorous doughnut PhD program of his own making.

Cova using "the mother-in-law"
After many hours spent frying and tinkering with dough, what he's ended up with are uncommonly tall, spryly flavored doughnuts that have just a whisper of grease.

We sampled all of the options during a recent visit: pineapple and brown butter ($3), chocolate ($3), blood orange ($3), plain with rainbow sprinkles ($2), miso-maple ($3) and banana curry with dulce de leche ($3).

These doughnuts have zip. Take the pineapple and brown butter: Cova makes the glaze with freshly pressed pineapple juice. The chocolate glaze is made with Fruition Chocolate, a small-batch bean-to-bar chocolate workshop in the Catskill Mountains, started by a classmate of Cova's from culinary school.

The store's eclectic art–created by Cova himself
Everything (except for the diminutive size of the place) is done in a big way. Just take the hulking tool that Cova found on eBay to use in lieu of stamping out doughnuts by hand. "We call it the 'mother-in-law'," Cova says, "because it's large, jagged and it takes balls (of dough) and breaks them down."