Chef fills hole by creating gourmet donuts
Consistently sold-out pop-up donut shop Burchie’s Gourmet Donuts looks toward summer for storefront operation
The words donut and gourmet so rarely have a chance to spend quality time with each other. Thankfully, for sweet-toothed residents of St. John’s, red-seal chef Alexandria Nash, 26, has put an end to that with Burchie’s Gourmet Donuts.
While on maternity leave after the birth of her daughter, Nash began selling baked goods out of her house. Last year for Father’s Day, she wanted to do something special.
“A few of my family members (said) ‘donuts for Dad sounds cool … why don’t you do that?’” she said. “That was the first time I actually put donuts out there and it got a lot of great feedback.”
But even then, she didn’t think it would become a business, and she returned to work as a production manager at the Newfoundland Chocolate Co.
Come January 2021, she felt unsatisfied, missing spending time with her family and wanting to get back to what she loved — baking.
“I bake as therapy for myself,” she said. “That’s why I started baking when I was 14. That was my outlet for all my anger, for all my sadness when I was hurting.”
Her father, Burch Nash, and was one of the 17 people who died when Cougar Helicopters Flight 491 crashed 55 kilometres east of St. John’s on March 12, 2009.
“I was pretty young. … It obviously was very sad, but I got so angry … and the only way I found to get out my aggression was to find something, obsess over it, and it distracted me,” she said. “I used to bake things and hyper-focus on how to make the perfect cookie, and then I’d give it to my mom and (she) would smile and that would make my day.”
In January, Nash put a poll up on her Facebook page to gauge interest in what would become Burchie’s Gourmet Donuts, she said.
“And it blew up,” she said. For several years, Nash worked at Chinched Restaurant and Deli at 5 Bates Hill in downtown St. John’s. She contacted chef and owner Shaun Hussey for advice, saying she didn’t have the space to meet the demand.
“Yes, you do,” Hussey said, and he opened his kitchen to her.
“She was an awesome worker, always loyal, I always thought the world of her, so … it was just kind of automatic,” Hussey said.
For her first pop-up on Jan. 31, she took pre-orders, but had some available for purchase that day as well.
“We sold everything in like 40 minutes,” she said.
Hussey said it’s awesome to see what Nash has done.
“She’s killing it, man, it’s wild,” he said. “The first one she did at the restaurant, I drove by when it was going on and … the lineup was up the street.”
She’s putting her heart and soul into it and it’s paying off, Hussey said.
Even though it has been only a couple of months, any time she puts out a call for orders, it isn’t long before she has to stop taking them. For Mother’s Day, the donuts sold out in eight minutes.
“A consistent comment is that I’m filling a craving that people didn’t even know they were missing,” she said.
The hope is, if all goes well, to have a stable storefront by June.