Cronut in South Korea: Want that with banana powder and Funky Filling?

SEOUL -- The vast food halls in Korean department stores are known for comprehensive displays of everything edible, from French pastry to freshly fried Korean pancakes stuffed with pine nuts; prosciutto to gummy worms; exquisitely packaged skeins of dried fish to musk melons that can run hundreds of dollars apiece. You will always find hundreds of varieties of both kimchi and expensive French wine; of both fermented bean sauces and fancy chocolates. The food halls are where a particular Korean cosmopolitanism comes out to play.

But in a run through a few of Seoul’s biggest department stores, including the flagships of the famous Lotte and Hyundai chains, I was surprised to see, solidly established as a franchise among the nooks selling Auntie Anne’s pretzels or Osulluc tea, were gleaming, new counters devoted to the New York cronut, sporting racks of cooling pastries, saleswomen wearing cardboard Uncle Sam hats and bilingual displays instructing customers on how best to customize their deep-fried American treats.

You could have them dusted with powdered banana if you wanted, stuffed with substances that included Funky Filling, Sweet Black Filling or California Filling. You could get them stacked two high, glued together with custard. There were even savory cronut holes dusted with onion powder or garlic powder, which I’m sure the pastry’s inventor Dominique Ansel never contemplated.

The woman behind the counter spoke as much English as I did Korean, which is to say none. So while I wasn’t expecting to get a cronut filled with sweet custard and sprinkled with a powdery orange substance very close to what comes out of the “cheese’” packet that comes inside a box of Kraft Dinner -- that is exactly what was handed to me in a red, white and blue pasteboard box.

Clearly, this was a cultural misunderstanding. But the cronut was also strangely delicious: oily but not as numbingly rich as I’d expected a wad of fried butter dough to be, satisfyingly crunchy, and tied together by its two levels of artificially enhanced dairy goodness. I couldn’t stop imagining savory Korean varieties of the treat, stuffed with kimchi perhaps, or spicy fried fish, or stewed galbi. (You can find kimchi doughnuts in L.A.’s Koreatown.) A new chapter in the history of food was perhaps being written, right there in the basement of the Hyundai store.

Still, I am sorry to report, there was not much of a line. As trans-Pacific phenomena go, at least at the moment, the cronut is no Krispy Kreme.

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