Valéry Jean-Bart has a clear raison d’être for his newest Val’s Cheesecakes Kitchen and Pantry, a shop that goes beyond selling his famously imaginative cheesecakes. For the fifth location, he says, “I’m gonna pay it forward and give small-business owners the opportunity that I never had.”
Currently in its soft opening until March 4, the shop next to Distinctive Vines in the Cedars will sell snacks, sandwiches and cheesecakes. It will also serve as a “kitchen incubator” by offering a geographically convenient commercial rental kitchen near downtown, its hotels, the Dallas Farmers Market and, soon, a new convention center.
Proximity to venues is key for budding business owners, Jean-Bart says, because “lugging your stuff all the way from Plano to Garland — that’s a task in itself.”
The rental kitchen has all the equipment required for preparing hot food, along with commercial mixers, prep tables and a convection oven. As an additional perk, renters can use the space to sell their food, host pop-ups and events, and even set up delivery services. The only no-no is cheesecakes, Jean-Bart says.
He’s also offering weekend cheesecake classes and business consulting services at the Kitchen and Pantry. “It’s all the things I did not have when I started,” he says.
A civil engineer by trade, Jean-Bart began moonlighting as a cheesecake baker in the kitchen at St. Paul United Methodist Church in 2013. He already knew how to bake cheesecakes from years of a Sunday ritual he shared with his “smart and formidable” Haitian mother, but when he started a business, “I didn’t have any direction at all,” he says.
His consulting services touch on most everything new business owners need to know, including the legal framework to start a business, trademarking, social media marketing, website development, food styling, graphic design, to-go packaging design, budgeting and all the ins and outs of Dallas city and health codes. After 10 years in the business, “I know everything I need to have to make a bakery run,” he says.
The idea for the location came from Jean-Bart’s wish for a pantry he could raid for snacks when he previously lived across the street. Peckish shoppers will find tortilla chips and salsa from Texas Sun Goods, Avery’s Savory Popcorn, and jams in flavors like orange ginger and blueberry serrano from East Dallas Marmalady.
In order to showcase the snacks and grilled sandwiches, the cheesecake menu is scaled back to classic strawberry and blueberry flavors, with only a few of the creative variations Val’s is known for, such as It’s Britney, Peach, with peach preserves, and the Bae, with caramel, vanilla pudding and candied pecans.
Already customers are requesting the Lemmon Avenue with lemon curd and lemon poppy seed crumble, but Jean-Bart insists on maintaining the Greenville Avenue flagship shop as the hub for his well-loved flavors, many of which he developed with his mother when they experimented with dessert recipes from shows she watched on the Food Network.
Twelve of their recipes have been incorporated into his first self-published recipe book, 12 Sundays: Cheesecake Recipes for Life, which was released last month.
The decor at the new Kitchen and Pantry includes some civil engineering books and a stack of voter registration cards, plus four large, freshly painted words on the walls: love, grace, dignity, respect. Jean-Bart says they’re a distillation of the lessons he learned from caring for his mother, Marie José Labossière, before she died of breast cancer in 2012.
The goal to keep her memory alive underlies most everything at Val’s Cheesecakes. “I owe it all to my mom,” he says.
Before Jean-Bart was born, Labossière lived in New York and learned to bake cheesecakes at a Jewish bakery, where her love for cheesecakes began.
Later, she married Jean-Bart’s father, a lawyer from Haiti. The couple got tired of the cold and moved back to their homeland in the ‘70s when the American dollar and economy were strong, and they decided their last child would be a Haitian child. Labossière was subsequently advised by her doctors to have an abortion after previous complications and suffering from preeclampsia, Jean-Bart says. She decided to have him anyway.
“Taking risks is in my DNA. Cheesecakes and taking risks is who I am,” Jean-Bart says. “Me being here is a total risk.”
After Labossière was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer while visiting Jean-Bart in Dallas in 2008, mother and son made cheesecakes every Sunday for four years. It was Jean-Bart’s way of pushing to make life normal and enjoyable for her, and it turned out to be an effective way to get her to eat while taking medications and undergoing chemotherapy treatments.
“I took care of her this way because I loved her,” Jean-Bart says.
The word “grace” is for the compassion he learned to give himself, even though he got frustrated at times, as most caretakers do.
“Dignity” stands for his decision to take her off life support. “I knew she wouldn’t want to live the way the doctors were telling me,” he says. “That is not the Marie José Labossière I knew.”
And “respect” is for the quality he’s grateful she instilled in him as a child.
“My mom was my inspiration,” Jean-Bart says. “She was everything to me.”
Val’s Cheesecakes Kitchen and Pantry is at 1112 S. Akard St., Dallas. Val’s also remains open at 2820 Greenville Ave. Dallas. valscheesecakes.com.
