Duly Lee, a maker of custom Basque cheesecakes in Cambridge, is an untraditional baker with an untraditional business. If you want one of his delights – crustless Spanish cakes with a burnt exterior and creamy insides – you have to do your research, place an order and wait potentially up to two weeks to pick it up. With a conversation.
Lee “is not curious about flavors” or “inspired by ingredients” in the way other chefs may be, he said. He bakes not for grandeur or culinary ego, but as meditation.
His Korean Momma cakes are praised online by customers as “the best and most unique cheesecakes that I have ever eaten,” leaving them reeling because “I had no idea how special it would be.” Yet Lee started baking only three years ago, when a friend from Spain’s Basque region brought a cheesecake to his wife’s birthday party. Lee spent the next eight months trying to re-create it and discovered the “priceless bubble” of the process.
While some say the Spanish version is more suitable for beginner bakers than the New York Cheesecake, Lee has found precision in the crustless airy basque cheesecake.
And he seems to have done so without even meaning to.
“I got addicted to it,” Lee said. “Not necessarily the baked goods that I was creating, but I got addicted to having my own time.”
An atypical entrepreneur
An Internet search for the Korean Momma business points to the address of Lee’s old apartment. That’s because Lee still does not own his Google business profile. A customer who wanted to leave a review created the profile for Lee when he was selling cakes out of his apartment.
“I had this ego/identity issue where I didn’t want to be pegged to be becoming a baker,” Lee said. “I have all these degrees. I’m an architect. I work in real estate. Baker? That just didn’t line up.”
But Lee needed income. After working in architecture and real estate, Lee took a job as an international consultant while his son underwent lifesaving surgery, the reason his family chose to stay in Cambridge, he said. Then came the global chaos of 2022, namely the Israel-Palestine conflict and the war in Ukraine, which led him to lose three consulting accounts. So Lee sold 10 to 12 cakes out of his apartment each week, a way to pay for his kids’ diapers, he said.
About a thousand cheesecakes later, Korean Momma still does not have its own storefront. While Lee no longer sells out of his home, a move that he said has greatly quieted complaints from his neighbors, the essence remains largely the same. The famous Basque cheesecakes are still made-to-order and are sold at biweekly drops at spots around Cambridge. (Slices are available also to diners at Darling in Central Square and The Black Sheep Lounge & Bar in The Kendall Square Hotel.)
Flavors as biography
Lee was born in Korea but grew up in Chile, Panama and Mexico, moving every few years. The 16 flavors of cheesecake are a manifestation of his global history. “Every title has a different degree of profoundness, or seriousness, or even lightness to a human story,” Lee said.
Lime Margarita was Lee’s first specialty flavor, an homage to the sips of margarita his dad would offer him on road trips in Mexico as a kid. Next came Panama Coffee, an ode to the smell that wakes him on mornings at his in-laws’ house. Vietnamese Coffee honors Lee’s time working at Cicada Coffee Bar in The Port neighborhood of Cambridge, where he’d have to drink cappuccinos the barista messed up, despite not being a coffee drinker at the time. Roasted Black Sesame celebrates Korean new year.
You wouldn’t grasp these intricacies from Korean Momma’s website, which displays flavor options unassumingly below the bakery’s motto – “sweet forgiveness.” The motto hints at Lee’s philosophy toward reckoning with his own intergenerational trauma, something he wears on his sleeve in conversation. Korean Momma itself is an homage to Lee’s relationship with his mother, which he labeled “dysfunctional.”
Lee’s approach to sales reflected the idiosyncrasy of the slogan. He would wait to put the finishing touches on cakes until each customer came to pick them up, allowing for five minutes of “therapy” and connection.
The MBA who felt like a sister
It takes only a conversation with Lee to understand that connection is not a marketing tactic. After just a few minutes, Lee may offer to train you as a part-time chef, take selfies or ask about your life’s journey.
This is still the case, even as Korean Momma has expanded and it’s no longer Lee at every drop. At the most recent, on Feb. 28 at Shojo in Central Square, Su-Jean Park, Lee’s business partner, chatted intentionally with each client as they came to retrieve their cake.
Park, an MBA graduate from the MIT Sloan School of Management, started out like the rest of Lee’s customers, a Korean Momma cheesecake enthusiast. She offered her help with baking, and later, dreamed up a business model.
“I just [couldn’t] seem to consider it a business, because it’s so personal,” Lee said, describing Park’s role in the company.
“I felt like she was my sister immediately, and then she also heard my hardship, my struggles, she shared hers too, and she just genuinely wanted to help me,” Lee said.
The two began a formal partnership in July. Lee said that by keeping the cakes made-to-order and selling them so exclusively, he has maintained a niche client base and retained power over his product.
Korean Momma has managed to preserve humanity within the food industry, a quality central to its origin story, in an age where food is increasingly commercialized.
With each interaction, Lee and Park live out the bakery’s other motto: “Indulge in the flavors of unspoken emotion.”
The next cheesecake drop is April 4 at Shojo.
This post was updated March 27, 2026, to correct a photo credit.
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