A brand that started What started off as a 200 sq. ft. experimental kitchen on Linking Road, Bandra ten years ago has today grown into one of Mumbai’s top dessert destinations patronized by top actors, industrialists and celebrities. Often referred as the cheesecake queen of Mumbai, Ruchyeta Bhatia’s Love & Cheesecake is all about the idea of building a scalable national dessert brand with consistent product quality appealed to her. Her partner in this is chef Amit who has over 10 years of experience in the hospitality industry, Ruchyeta shares the same passion and currently, they serve more than 7000 cheesecake slices a day. Pretty cheesy right?
Tell us something about your journey as to how this started?
I joined entered the advertising industry after completing my major in Economics and during one of my outings with I had the idea to start a premium dessert café. Later as she narrowed down her options, she decided to undergo a culinary course to get familiar with this sector. She got accepted in the Culinary Institute of America but it needed her to spend six months in a commercial kitchen before starting the course. This brought her to Mumbai’s Marriott Hotels for an internship where she got introduced to pastry chef Amit Sharma who had over 10 years of experience in the hospitality industry. Eventually he joined Ruchyeta in her entrepreneurial journey bringing in the necessary expertise and the drive to create something new and big. Their passion for desserts led to the inception of Love & Cheesecake in 2012. What started off as a 300 sq. ft. experimental kitchen on Linking Road, Bandra ten years ago has today grown into one of Mumbai’s top dessert destinations patronized by top actors, industrialists and celebrities.
Both Amit and you are known to have stirred the love for Cheesecake in Mumbai. What do you have to say about this?
My experience also spans across various Starwood hotels before I moved for a while to Australia where I was put in a department to make only cheesecakes for the 1st one year. That is when my story with cheesecakes began.
Cheesecakes are mouth-watering appetizers which can be tried in different variations. Cheesecake as a dessert item has moved from European tables to Indian dining tables within no time! In recent years India has changed tremendously for food and restaurants. With a growing middle class and improving quality of life in urban areas, more people have been willing to spend on quality food and lifestyle products. What we noticed in India specifically is that cheesecakes really were popular especially among younger generations because they were seen as cool and stylish.
Our cheesecakes and desserts are premium because they are made from premium ingredients. For example, all our cheesecakes are made from light, Italian dessert cheese or the deeply textured cream cheese. We don’t use whipped cream etc. because we believe it’s bad for your health whereas cheese is purely a dairy product.
Finally, it comes down to our business choices and what we really believe in. For example, we are investing a lot in ensuring our supply chain works well. Since our cheesecakes are extremely delicate, we have our own refrigerated delivery trucks that deliver desserts to our store - because we didn’t want our desserts to suffer from temperature variations - that’d spoil the experience. We also have 40 of our own delivery riders to deliver individual cakes from our refrigerated hubs across the city. So while its costly to own and operate an in-house logistics team, we think that that’s essential. Similarly, most of our chefs have a five star experience in their CVs. Even then, they undergo a rigorous training program with us. So I think it really comes down to what one stands for. We hope that in the long run our customers will see through our commitment and focus on quality control and keep coming back to us.
The food business was tough during pandemic. What had been your survival mantra?
The year 2020 saw a paradigm shift in consumer habits. It was the year of learning for us as a company and as a family of 300+ team members. A lot of our values and ethos stood the test of time and allowed us to emerge from the initial shock of the pandemic with new ideas and practices. With a renewed passion to better serve our customers’ needs and at the same time allowing us to re-focus our energies on emerging trends of clean eating, healthy grains & positive sugars.
We are firm believers that word of mouth is the best form of marketing. Paid advertising or other marketing channel cannot beat your best friend coming and recommending Love and Cheesecake’s Red Velvet Cheesecake or Poetry’s Portobello Panino Sandwich. We keep doing brand building initiatives from time to time but our belief is that word of mouth is what really works. But that has helped us build a sustainable food services business.
During the pandemic, we realised we had to momentarily pivot our business model from being a brick and mortar operation to a convenient-delivery model. We setup food trucks in various building complexes across the city and supplied all our baked goods through a Whatsapp group model.
You recently entered Delhi market. How do you see the response?
The response in Delhi has been overwhelming. We are very confident about our product and with that confidence we entered the North market. We of course had our initial jitters while entering the market since the city was new; but the way the city took on our products, it was phenomenal. We got a terrific response from our 1st Love and Cheesecake outlet at Defence Colony that was started earlier his year which gave us the confidence to do more and the upcoming launch of Poetry in Gurgaon is the result of that.
Which one is the hot selling cheesecake and what are top five one needs to try while visiting Love and Cheesecake?
We would say that the hot selling cheesecake at present is the ‘Baklava Cheesecake’ but it keeps changing with time and also based on our latest drops. Further, our top-five cheesecake recommendations that one must try at the moment would be our Original New York Style Baked Cheesecake, Godiva Chocolate Cheesecake, Salted Caramel Baked Cheesecake, Apple Crumble Baked Cheesecake and the Pecan & Pralines Baked Cheesecake.
How often you change your menu and what all you take care while doing the same?
We add different flavours of cheesecake to our menu every three to four months. We are constantly working on new flavour trials in our R&D dept and love to delight our customers with innovative and unique recipes.
What’s the weirdest cheesecake that you guys have come across?
One of the weirdest flavours of cheesecake Chef Amit once came across while holidaying in Bali was an Avocado and Lime Cheesecake. Safe to say, we never tried that experiment!
What’s that one cheesecake you would bake for your family?
Honestly, it’s really difficult to choose one and we would rather take one slice of every cheesecake home for our families to try. But if we really have to pick one then we would definitely pick the Macadamia Nut & Caramel Cheesecake. Or the Fresh Alphonso Mango Cheesecake when in season. It’s decadent!