Obviously, the pandemic challenges chefs and restaurant owners in unexpected ways, but the team behind one of New York City’s hottest restaurants, Wildair, stumbled into an intriguing solution to the suspension of indoor dining. They pivoted to donuts.
Well, sandwiches and donuts to be clear, but one of the more popular donuts has Italian provenance. Chef and co-owner of Wildair, Fabián Von Hauske Valtierra, also one of the city’s most respected pastry chefs, came up with the idea for a tiramisù donut.
Von Hauske Valtierra tells La Cucina Italiana that the famed Italian dessert is a longtime personal favorite, and one that he and chef-partner Jeremiah Stone had on the menu at the Lower East Side restaurant that they formerly co-owned, Una Pizza Napoletana. He and Stone cut ties with the well-reviewed pizzeria, but Von Hauske Valtierra says, “I’ve always wanted to make tiramisù again, and I thought it would be funny to make a donut.”
The chefs are known for inventive small plates at both Wildair and Contra, their laid-back fine-dining restaurant (currently open for takeout), so even when they make donuts, the ingredients tell a story. For the tiramisù donut, Von Hauske Valtierra creates a brioche out of yeasted enriched dough. The dough proofs overnight in the refrigerator. The next day, he fries the donuts and injects a cream that mixes the traditional mascarpone with a sabayon and whipped cream. Half the donut is then dipped in a glaze made from coffee (by local roastery Caffé Vita) and amaro (by Brooklyn-based distiller Forthave). The other half is dusted with cocoa powder.
“It’s all the components of a tiramisù in a donut,” he says with a laugh.
The donut and sandwich concept has helped the chefs through the pandemic, Von Hauske Valtierra says, but they look forward to opening their restaurants properly again. Before closing down, Wildair and Contra regularly attracted crowds for cutting-edge cooking and a well-curated natural wine selection. “We wanted to do something a bit different than just serve our food outside. It just felt kind of lame, like a washed-out experience of what we normally do,” he says. "We wanted to do something simple. Now, we’re just a sandwich and donut shop.”
Fortunately for fans of the tiramisù donut and the other limited-edition options that Von Hauske Valtierra and friends dream up—only 100 donuts are made daily and sometimes include collaborations with culinary friends—the donuts and sandwiches will live on once Wildair reopens. Von Hauske Valtierra says the restaurant will continue serving sandwiches and donuts during the day, when it’s typically closed, while returning to normal programming at night, once it’s safe to do so.