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.
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…