A friend once tried to order beignets in New Orleans that were “light on the sugar.” The waitress was perturbed. When the beignets arrived, they came with sugar on the side, in a bowl, two inches deep.Indigenous to New Orleans, beignets are of the same genus as doughnuts but a separate species: pieces of puffed-up fried dough with an airiness somewhere between buoyancy and levitation. They leave drifts of confectioners’ sugar in their wake. Matt Pace, who grew up in New Orleans East and moved to New York a decade ago to make a life as a painter, started frying up his hometown treat at outdoor food markets in 2014 under the name Booqoo Beignets. He taught kickboxing on the side (“I’ve had many lives,” he said with a laugh) and saved money toward opening a restaurant, which he finally did last August: Cafe Booqoo, on the border of Carroll Gardens and Gowanus in Brooklyn.
