By Caitlin Raux
What happens when a former Chanterelle sous chef takes up donut-making? For one thing, New Yorkers get a fresh supply of amazing-quality, artful (read: Insta-friendly) donuts. Add a healthy shake of scrappiness — an essential ingredient for anyone crazy enough to open a 116-square-foot artisanal donut shop inside a busy carwash on the West Side Highway — and you’ve got yourself a quintessential New York story. There’s even a line of yellow cabs in the background.
With his hugely popular Underwest Donuts, Scott Levine (Culinary Arts, ‘04) has elevated the hole-y donut to new heights, and has managed to do so in a place where most fledging owners wouldn’t look twice. But in a space the size of most suburban closets, Scott saw an opportunity to reinvent a New York staple and ran with it. Suddenly, Westside Highway Car Wash had a new stream of customers, more interested in the “Car Wash” glazed donut (vanilla-lavender flavor) than an actual car wash. Riding on the success of their first location, Underwest Donuts opened a second outpost in a similarly transit-heavy area, just a few steps from Penn Station.
Recently we caught up with Scott to chat about his unlikely entry into the artisanal donut game and his definitive stance on a very heated topic — dunking.
