Ten years ago, Marie Jose Labossiere came from Haiti to visit her son, Valery Jean-Bart, in Dallas. It was supposed to be typical family visit during a hot Texas summer. Instead, it included a trip to the hospital and a terminal breast cancer diagnosis.
Doctors said she only had six months to live, but she lived another four years. During those final years together, mother and son baked cheesecakes. A lot of cheesecakes.
Sundays are for baking
Sundays are important in Haiti, so that became the day they would experiment. During the week, Labossiere would come up with elaborate grocery lists and exotic ingredients for new recipes. They ended up with dozens of recipes before her death in August 2012.
Jean-Bart was still working as a civil engineer with the city of Dallas at the time but decided to put more than 200 Sundays of baking and recipe-testing to work. Now he owns Val's Cheesecakes, with locations on Maple Avenue and Greenville Avenue in Dallas. But brick and mortar locations weren't his initial goal.
Jean-Bart started out with one client. "I wrote a letter to Oddfellows and was like, 'Do you want to try my cheesecake?'" he says. "He [Matt Spillers] told us to bring one cheesecake. My business partner and I brought eight."
The side hustle
That first tasting was in spring 2013, and Jean-Bart began supplying restaurants and coffee shops, making cheesecakes in a church basement, while still working his day job. "That was pretty intense," he says.
Jean-Bart knew it was time to turn the cheesecake side-hustle into full-time work when he was excusing himself from a meeting to smooth over customer concerns and worry about ingredient sourcing. So, in August 2017, he went all in.
The second location of Val's Cheesecakes has been open for about six months.
Sweet and savory
On a recent Monday, Jean-Bart and an associate prepared dozens upon dozens of cheesecake cupcakes.
"This is way better. My days are 24/7, but I get to do what I like to do and be my own boss," Jean-Bart says.
Both shops offer sweet and savory options. The sweet options have traditional flavors like turtle cheesecake and strawberry cheesecake, but there are also fun twists like the lemon cheesecake with a lemon poppy seed crust named after Lemmon Avenue.
At the Greenville Avenue location, the best-seller is banana pudding cheesecake. At The Shack on Maple Avenue, classic strawberry is the favorite.
Discovering a passion
Val's Cheesecakes also sells savory cheesecakes, including a brisket cheesecake with a cornbread crust. "You can't be in Texas and not have a brisket cheesecake," he says.
Jean-Bart said he was lucky to discover this passion. "After 18 years doing engineering, I discover this," he says.
He can remember which year each cheesecake on the menu was created. The red velvet cheesecake recipe came together on March 2011.
Jean-Bart's mother lives on in every part of the business, even beyond the recipes. The vibrant blue color on the menu and the building was her favorite color. He took a shirt to a paint shop to get the right swatch.
"In Haiti, we put everything in jars," he says. "My mom was pretty adamant. She was like, 'Have you thought about putting it in a jar?'" And, it turns out, the shop's mini jarred cheesecakes are immensely popular, especially when wedding season rolls around.
Jean-Bart admires his mother's resilience and hopes her legacy of hard work lives on through the shop.
"There's something I'm doing that reminds me of her," Jean-Bart says.
Caitlin Cruz is a Dallas freelance writer.
