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Friday, March 29, 2024

The Dō shop in New York gives cookie dough an ice cream-style presentation. (Photos: Dō)

Frozen yogurt had its day as a nouveau fad (six places to get it in Harvard Square and four in Davis Square in 2013, now almost all gone) and the current craze is for poké, the Hawaiian raw fish salads sometimes served as burritos (four poke places have opened within the past few months between Harvard and Davis).

What will follow when poké is past its peak? Here’s an idea: The cookie dough confectionary – a shop serving “raw” cookie dough treats.

The stuff can be served as though it were ice cream, in cones and sandwiches, or as pie filling; since it’s dough, it can also be used as the “cookie” in the ice cream sandwich or as a cupcake with Nutella inside. That’s how it’s presented at (pronounced “dough”) in New York’s Greenwich Village, where Kristen Tomlan opened last week after finding a formula for cookie dough that meant it could be consumed like the classic sleepover snack without having to worry about its uncooked eggs and flour.

The cookie dough at Dō can also serve as dough around an ice cream sandwich.

The 15-seat shop has been overwhelmed since the doors opened, with lines down the block and online orders suspended while Tomlan’s workers struggle to catch up. One customer said on Facebook that she flew to New York just to try Dō; others have been asking when and where the company will franchise and whether they can buy in and be the local rep.

We asked Tomlan about expansion plans, with Harvard Square as a likely place for a shop.

“Not completely out of the question – just not right away,” Tomlan said. “We certainly have plans to expand, but we want to get the first shop up and running first.”

Nutella-filled cupcakes are also sold at Dō’s shop in New York’s Greenwich Village.

That might get local entrepreneurial minds thinking. Tomlan, after all, is not the only person to come up with a safe way to eat cookie dough – there are a number of recipes online, and options sold online and in grocers’ freezers. Her competition there includes the sister-owned The Cookie Dough Cafe, founded in 2011 in Normal, Ill., whose products can be bought online and at several stores in Boston; Edoughble, a family-owned Los Angeles company founded in 2013 that sells online and in bricks-and-mortar shops mainly in Southern California; and Unbaked: A Cookie Dough Bar, opened in 2015 by a former sports journalist in Woodland Hills, Calif. But whatever the name sounds like, Unbaked has no storefront operation.

But even though Central Square’s Little Donkey beat Tomlan to the punch in one way – it opened in August with a cookie dough dessert served whimsically on the beater of a blender – and Brighton’s Moogy’s Sandwich Shop sells cookie dough coated in pancake batter and deep fried, no one really competes with Tomlan’s store concept on city streets.

Yet.