A Bay Area Cheesecake Sensation Finds a New Home — in Taipei

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.” 

So when a group of investors asked Chen to help them launch a new restaurant group based in Taiwan, he jumped at the opportunity. Last year, he closed up shop in the Bay Area and moved to Taipei. 

But that doesn’t mean Chen left behind the 17 years he’d spent immersed in Bay Area food culture. In fact, his first restaurant in Taiwan, a brunch spot called Kismet, was conceived as a direct homage to Northern California cuisine. Open since October in Taipei’s bustling Da’an District, the restaurant is serving dishes like citrus-marinated beet salad and Hangtown fry — and, yes, Chen’s signature cheesecakes. It’s almost certainly the only restaurant of its kind in Taiwan. 

Chen, whose mother is Taiwanese, says he was tired of going to mediocre Western restaurants in Taipei and hearing people say, “That’s pretty good for Taiwan.” 

“All of these places have been localized, to a certain extent,” Chen says. Ingredients are swapped out; flavors get adjusted to suit local preferences. What he dreamed of creating was a place that would give Taiwanese diners a real taste of California.

What does it even mean, though, to open a “Northern California–style” restaurant in a city like Taipei, where the vast majority of people have never encountered a Hass avocado, or even heard of Tartine Bakery or Chez Panisse? (So far, Chen says he’s had to research and formulate about 95% of Kismet’s recipes himself, even though he never had any professional training as a chef. No one else on his team knows what the food is supposed to taste like.)

Part of the answer, of course, is a very Northern California focus on seasonality and the sourcing of individual ingredients from the best available local farmers. But the most striking aspect of Kismet’s menu is that it reads like a list of greatest hits from Bay Area restaurants past and present.

There is, for instance, fried chicken that’s served with cornmeal waffles that bear a striking resemblance to the crisp, airy version that Tanya Holland served at Brown Sugar Kitchen for many years before it closed. (“The waffle is completely inspired by her,” Chen says.) There’s an homage to 20th Century Cafe’s delicately layered Russian honey cake, made with local Taiwanese honey. There’s custardy pain perdu inspired by the version that often graces the brunch menu at Verjus.

Even though Taiwanese diners generally don’t like eating beets, Chen says he couldn’t resist putting a beet salad on the menu — specifically one inspired by a citrus-marinated beet salad he used to order at the old Boot & Shoe Service. It’s tossed with homemade ricotta and Hass avocados, which Chen imports. (In this one case, he says, the local Taiwanese ones just don’t taste right.)

For a Bay Area diner visiting the restaurant, perhaps the most delightful dish on the menu is a modern take on a Hangtown fry, that classic Gold Rush–era dish that, as Chen points out, isn’t even easy to find in San Francisco these days. Kismet’s version is made with small Taiwanese oysters from Dongshi, bacon cured by a local artisan, and French-style soft-scrambled eggs. The egg preparation is so unusual to locals, Chen’s staff hasn’t quite figured out how to explain it in Mandarin. Still, he says, many of the restaurant’s Taiwanese customers have been quite taken with the dish, finding it not altogether dissimilar to Taiwanese oyster omelettes, a common local street food.

Kismet is open Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m.–4 p.m., at No. 41, Siwei Rd., Da’an District, Taipei, Taiwan.