Baltimore (and TikTok) pastry sensation Cloudy Donut opens in Brooklyn Heights 

By Scott Lynch

Cloudy Donut — which Derrick and Justin Faulcon created in 2020 in Baltimore, and turned into a social-media hit during the pandemic — features a rotating selection of more than 40 flavors of vegan donuts. They are puffy and light (hence the name), colorful and creative, sugary sweet and fun to eat.

Last Saturday morning, after nearly two years of Covid-delayed development, Cloudy Donut opened its first shop in New York City, in Brooklyn Heights on charming Columbia Place, with its porched wooden homes and the historic, iron-terraced Riverside Houses complex, all within steps of the Promenade, Adam Yauch Park, and Brooklyn Bridge Park below.

A sneak preview party on Thursday evening attracted over 100 eager eaters, most of them locals, shop operator Zewiditu Jewel tells Brooklyn Magazine. This was fortunate because the grand opening on Saturday was preceded by an hours-long power outage on the block, which prevented the Cloudy Donut crew from making more than a dozen or so racks of their namesake treats.

Everything, including the cookies and cinnamon buns, sold out within an hour.

The opening day, power-outage-shortened lineup of raspberry rosé, brown butter chocolate chip, cookie monster, pistachio, brown butter white chocolate macadamia; $4 each (Scott Lynch)

But there’s also more going on here than just pastries. Cloudy Donut is a Black-owned business that, as Jewel put it, “loves to reverse gentrify. It’s this ideology that we come in as a Black business to affluent neighborhoods, for visibility not only to Black people but also to places that maybe aren’t used to seeing Black business owners.” Brooklyn Heights, one of wealthiest neighborhoods in New York City and recently outed as a celebrity magnet by the New York Times, felt like the perfect fit.

“When we knew we wanted to come to New York,” said Jewel, “everyone was like ‘go to Bed-Stuy, go to Harlem.’ And while we love those places, and I’ve lived in both areas, we wanted to do something different.”

Cloudy Donut keeps everything vegan with tricks like using applesauce rather than eggs as a binder, and they are anything but austere. Among the many flavors you’ll see in coming weeks are chia sugar, blood orange, pumpkin spice latte, PB&J, sexual chocolate, and cherry pie. There are also boozy ones like Saturday’s raspberry rosé, which came with a dropper of wine that you squirt into the interior, and a “Snoop Doggy Donut” for canine customers.

Vegan cinnamon buns and cookies (Scott Lynch)

As long as the power stays on, the plan is to feature eight different treats every weekend. We wolfed a blue glazed, crumb-topped “cookie monster” crowd-pleaser, a pistachio (my favorite), a brown butter chocolate chip, and a brown butter white chocolate macadamia, the latter two obvious offshoots of the actual cookies on hand. The crew did an excellent job under pressure — imagine working for literal years on a shop and then have the power fail in the last hours before opening? — so we look forward to visiting under more ideal conditions.

Either way, the locals seem thrilled. Just having access to a to-go cup of coffee down here is a big boost to the block. “It feels exciting,” Columbia Street resident Kaila Kushner tells us. “A lot of people have been looking forward to the shop opening for over a year so we’re happy to see some life here, kids and families and people just really pumped to get a donut.”

Brown butter white chocolate macadamia and pistachio donuts on quiet Columbia Place (Scott Lynch)

Cloudy Donut is located at 14 Columbia Place, just south of Joralemon Street, and is currently open on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (346-463-9628)