My Daddy's Cheesecake to close its doors March 20

At 4:30 on any weekday morning, head baker Mike Davis arrives at La Croix Plaza to start the batter for the 150 to 200 muffins that will fuel still-sleeping patrons. At 6 a.m., owner Wes Kinsey shows up to prep the store for opening. It's a routine they will soon have to break.

In 1996, Kinsey bought more than a bakery. When the 30-year baking veteran purchased My Daddy's Cheesecake from founder Tom Harte, he bought a piece of Cape Girardeau, an institution that seemed to hold limitless potential. Yet on March 20, only eight years later, he will close the business for good.

The decision is due to "cash flow problems." Kinsey said.

"It's like the slow death taking place in the family. You watch it slowly come apart," he said. "You struggle to keep it alive until you reach that point, the point where you have to have the faith to let it go in hopes that maybe somebody can pick up the pieces."

Once unthinkable

Five years ago, this was unthinkable. The cheesecake institution Harte had created in 1987 was thriving under Kinsey's tenure. Having bought the company and the store at 111 Main in 1996, Kinsey -- a graduate of Chicago's Wilton School of Confectionary Arts -- used his baking experience to take the company national. The business was first featured on QVC in a nationwide broadcast in August 1997. That exposure prompted Kinsey to take to the Internet in 1998.

"We had so much going for us," he recalled. "We were really rolling. We had big customers all over the country."

The customers included Lutron Industries, a fluorescent lighting company in New Jersey. Lutron found My Daddy's on the Web and ordered 800 cheesecakes to go out as Christmas gifts to the company's clients. A Mercedes dealership in California did the same. The national exposure spurred a response that made Kinsey dizzy with possibilities: new stores, new franchises on the horizon as the wave rolled on. But that was the crest. My Daddy's Cheesecake's days in downtown Cape were numbered.

A beginning

The downtown store at 111 Main was opened out of necessity by Harte due to the increasing demand for his homemade cheesecake.

A professor of speech at Southeast Missouri State University, Harte and his wife, Jane, belonged to a supper club composed of Tom's colleagues and their spouses. When the group held a dessert night in 1987, Harte brought in one of his homemade cheesecakes.

"I remember Lauchette Low, the wife of a fellow professor, trying some and saying, 'Tom, these are good enough to sell,'" Harte recalled. Together, Harte and Low decided to run with that suggestion.

They started by making four cakes a week and taking them to Jeremiah's Restaurant, Harte said. His daughter, Jill, happened to work there as a waitress. "When customers would finish their dinner, she'd ask them, 'Would you like some of my daddy's cheesecake?'" he said. "Pretty soon all the servers were offering their customers a piece of 'my daddy's cheesecake.'"

After a short while, the Hartes and the Lows were collaborating to get cheesecakes out of their home kitchens and into other restaurants in Cape Girardeau. Soon, "my daddy's cheesecake" was being offered by waiters and waitresses in 11 local eateries.

"We were making 20 to 30 cheesecakes every weekend," Harte said. "We didn't really know what we were doing, but after awhile it became obvious that our kitchens weren't going to be able to handle the volume in demand."

The couples rented a room in the Plaza Galleria, filled it with industrial ovens and set to work in the wholesale and mail-order cheesecake business.

Now that it was an official business, what to call it? Harte needed look no further than his daughter's sales pitch.

Meanwhile, Harte's cheesecakes were garnering national recognition. Entered in the nationally renowned Gorman Baking contest, Harte's Turtle cake -- a mix of pecans and caramel layered through a cake topped in chocolate -- and his praline cake -- more pecans and caramel with a caramel topping -- took the top prize for new dessert in 1990 and 1991, respectively. With that recognition came even more demand. It became apparent that the stuffy little kitchen where the couples toiled to fill orders by hand would require some retail space.

A new daddy

And for five years things were good. Business continued to swell with the store's reputation.

But after some time, the business seemed to outgrow its parents' passion for it. Finally, Harte and company -- still dedicated to their teaching jobs and careers -- began to feel the strain.

"It became apparent that we had run with it as far as we could," Harte said. "Somebody else would have to take it from there."

That person was Kinsey, a veteran baker who had helped Harte during the holiday rush in previous years. In 1996, after a career of professional cake decoration and two attempts at opening his own business, Kinsey bought the name and building from Harte.

The wave continued to build. The QVC piece and the Web-based mail-order business swept the store right into 1999. But then something happened. Suddenly, the wave broke.

Business began to slow. The 1999-2000 holiday orders -- typically the business' busiest time -- had fallen off from past years.

"We became concerned with the business atmosphere of downtown," Kinsey said. "We were worried that it was becoming more of a nightlife atmosphere. We even tried staying open later, but it didn't work."

In addition, Kinsey was hearing complaints about the lack of parking downtown. Compounding that, there was Sept. 11, 2001, which drove the country further into recession. When the 2001 Christmas receipts went down even further, Kinsey felt something needed to be done. Relocation was his answer.

He considered moving the business out of Cape Girardeau. He looked at Clayton in the St. Louis area. Then he was asked to become the anchor store in a new shopping center on Cape La Croix Road.

The new center offered a state-of-the-art facility with more retail space, a bigger kitchen and a drive-through. So Kinsey moved My Daddy's Cheesecake to La Croix Village.

What went wrong

At around 9:30 a.m., Kinsey takes the cheesecakes out of the freezer. The breakfast rush having dissipated, the store is quiet again. It's time to remove them from their pans and make them ready for sale. It's a menial task for a master baker, but Kinsey has plenty of time to think about why. What did he do wrong?

After the move to the new building, he said, business got better. The bigger facility allowed space for a banquet room and a catering business. More retail space meant more room for patrons to eat an ever-expanding menu, incorporating breakfast and sandwiches for lunch and dinner. On the west end of town, Kinsey could now cater to more affluent clientele who would come to Cape Girardeau.

"We figured this was an area where people would be freer with their money," Kinsey said.

To some extent, he was right.

Sales were four times higher than downtown. But the overhead is higher, too, so high that Kinsey knows he and his family can't afford to keep fighting a losing battle. He knows it's time to cut their losses.

He doesn't know what happened for sure. What he does know is that he'll miss it.

He'll miss Kevin Ford from nearby Ford and Sons Funeral Home. Ford comes in almost every morning and orders scrambled eggs, bacon, coffee and soda.

He'll miss Mrs. Powell, who comes through the drive-through with her children on the way to school. It's two chocolate milks, two muffins and a cup of coffee.

While he'll miss the regulars, he can't help but resent those who have not come.

"I do feel betrayed," Kinsey said. "We've tried. But I see people eating all over town. Why do they never come to us?"

He hopes someone will come along who wants the name and trademark and wants to fulfill the store's once-glorious promise.

"It's a good name and a wonderful product," Kinsey said. "It could be a successful business."

trehagen@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 137