Every cheesecake that’s ever left Val’s Cheesecakes traces back to a Sunday ritual in a home kitchen. Valery “Val” Jean-Bart spent four years caring for his mother, Marie Jose Labossiere, through terminal breast cancer, and the two of them baked together every week, more than 200 sweet and savory creations over that stretch, cheesecake being her favorite. When she passed in 2012, Jean-Bart, a licensed civil engineer with no formal culinary background, had to decide what came next.
He wrote a letter to Matt Spillers, the chef and owner behind Oddfellows, Eno’s, and Union Bear, and not long after, Val’s cheesecakes started showing up on menus around Bishop Arts. CraveDFW has been following the story since nearly the beginning, and it’s been a genuinely eventful decade since that first letter.
The business grew fast and messily in the years that followed, the kind of growth that comes from real demand outpacing a one-man operation. Jean-Bart opened his first storefront, The Shack, on Maple Avenue next to the Grapevine Bar in 2015, followed by a Greenville Avenue location in 2017. A brief, rocky partnership with The Exchange food hall in the AT&T Discovery District ended abruptly in 2021 after a dispute over a 500-cheesecake catering order for a convention, Jean-Bart said he and his team delivered closer to 600 and still got pulled aside mid-event and told to stall customers when the supply ran out. The Shack on Maple closed later that same year as Jean-Bart consolidated toward a planned baking hub.
By 2024, the toll of running the business solo for twelve years caught up with him. Jean-Bart told the Dallas Morning News that the business was thriving even as he wasn’t, and that he needed time to simply be a person rather than a caregiver-turned-business-owner who’d never had a break between the two roles. He began working to copyright Val’s logo and core recipes with the goal of licensing the brand to a new owner, while announcing the Greenville Avenue location would close for good in December 2024. In his own words at the time, closing that space wasn’t just shutting a storefront, it was letting go of something that had been a huge part of his life and journey.
Val hasn’t fully left the kitchen, though. Alongside the transition, he launched Val’s Blue Label, a smaller, more personal cheesecake operation built around custom cakes, pre-orders, consulting, and the cheesecake-making classes he’s become known for, all still running out of the South Akard Street location.
Today, Val’s Cheesecakes continues to operate at 1112 S. Akard St., open Friday through Sunday, offering the full lineup of jars, slices, and whole cheesecakes alongside those hands-on classes where guests spend two and a half hours learning the craft over wine, wearing closed-toed shoes as Val’s one piece of standing advice, because regulars know they’ll end up dancing around the prep tables before the night’s over.
The flavor lineup still reads like a love letter to his mother’s Sunday kitchen: the classic New York slice, a red velvet version regulars swear is the city’s best, mango and strawberry options built around bright fruit, and a rotating cast of seasonal specials that lean boozy, chocolatey, or holiday-themed depending on the month. Around Thanksgiving, the shop’s Pumpkin Cheesecake Pie and Pecan Cheesecake Pie have become genuine seasonal staples, cheesecake and pie hybrids that split the difference for anyone who can’t choose between the two at the holiday table.
What’s kept Val’s Cheesecakes a Dallas fixture through all the openings, closings, and reinventions isn’t just the flavor lineup. It’s Jean-Bart himself, a founder whose grief turned into a business that people describe less like a transaction and more like a hug, and who’s now figuring out, in real time and in public, what it looks like to build a second chapter around the same craft without losing himself in it a second time.
Val’s Cheesecakes is open Friday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., at its lone location, 1112 S. Akard St. in the Cedars District, Dallas. More at valscheesecakes.com, including cheesecake class bookings and online ordering.
