In the early days of the pandemic, circa 2020–2021, there might not have been any Bay Area food product as wildly popular as Basuku’s burnt-topped, oozingly creamy Basque cheesecakes. Founder Charles Chen started baking the cakes out of his Oakland apartment, inspired by a version he’d first tried in Japan. And for the next few years, it often felt like customers needed to sell off their first-born child if they wanted to get a hold of one. Instagram flash sales sold out within minutes. When Chen scheduled pop-ups at local restaurants, the lines would stretch, seemingly endlessly, all the way around the block.
These days, Japanese-style Basque cheesecakes are a regular feature of the Bay Area’s fancy-dessert landscape — a trend largely started by Chen’s scrappy, one-man operation. But while the popularity of Basuku’s cheesecakes never wavered, Chen wasn’t ever able to find a suitable location for a brick-and-mortar version of the bakery. By 2025, he was burnt out from the seven-day-a-week grind of his baking schedule. Meanwhile, he’d spent the better part of a year helping to open a restaurant in Kyoto, Japan, and holding two successful monthlong cheesecake pop-ups in Taipei, Taiwan.
He started to think to himself, “Wow, it’s kind of nice living in Asia.”…