Ruchyeta Bhatia On Her Love For Cheesecakes
Image Credit: Ruchyeta Bhatia

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.

Baileys Cheesecake

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!