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Before COVID, Lisa Sasscer was happily minding her own business. She sold home-baked gourmet cheesecakes wholesale to restaurants throughout the state of Maryland. Her clients were content and so was Sasscer, who lived in Baltimore at the time.
But all the eateries closed during quarantine, and Sasscer’s business tanked.
“It was awful,” she recalls.
Sasscer’s fiancé, Richard Zak, urged her to leave Maryland and start a bakery in Ventnor, where he lives. It was a risky move, but Sasscer had been considering the idea because she wanted to be closer to Zak.
To gauge interest among potential customers, she had been showcasing her cheesecakes at various famers markets at the Jersey Shore.
“We sold out every time,” she says. “It got me thinking that if we had a bakery, we could fill the need.”
Lisa Sasscer, owner of Sasscer's Cheesecakes, uses her mother's recipe for her popular cheesecakes.
Sasscer put her house on the market, sold it and invested nearly every dime of her savings to launch Sasscer’s Cheesecakes in Ventnor.
“It was scary,” Sasscer says, “but it was the best thing I ever did.”
Sasscer’s Cheesecakes, a 1,600-square-foot shop with retail and kitchen space, offers 40 different kinds of cheesecake, from plain to mocha cappuccino to apple peach cobbler to salty caramel cream — and everything in between. The cheesecakes come in three sizes: 4 inches, 6 inches and 10 inches.
The bakery also sells bread, pies, cookies, cream puffs, and cakes, as well as cupcakes that are filled with creamy cheesecake. Two bakers make the confections, and five employees decorate the baked items and handle the register.
BY MARIA WOLF