Savor Scout › Food guides › Cheesecake
How to find good cheesecake
Cheesecake comes in very different styles — dense New York, caramelised Basque, airy Japanese, Italian ricotta — and the best bakeries make one style very well rather than thirty flavours of the same base.
What separates a good one from a bad one
- Dense and smooth (New York) — Rich cream cheese, a little tang, a graham cracker crust.
- Burnt top (Basque) — Deeply caramelised outside, almost molten inside, no crust.
- Light and jiggly (Japanese) — Soufflé-like, cotton-soft, gently sweet.
- Made in-house — Many restaurants buy cheesecake from wholesalers. House-made is worth seeking.
- Not too sweet — Good cheesecake tastes of cheese.
What to order
- Plain New York cheesecake — The test.
- Basque burnt cheesecake — If available.
- Japanese cheesecake — From an Asian bakery.
- Ricotta cheesecake — Italian-style.
- A whole one — For a celebration.
Where to find Cheesecake
Cheesecake is mostly found at dessert shops, so that is where to look. Open listings put 9,709 of them across the US, and these are the cities and campuses with the most.
Cities with the most
New York, NY 188 Chicago, IL 107 Houston, TX 100 Las Vegas, NV 96 Los Angeles, CA 93 San Diego, CA 61 San Francisco, CA 57 Philadelphia, PA 55
Campuses with the most within a mile
NYU 77 New School University 67 Baruch 63 The Graduate Center 49 Touro University 47 FIT 45
A few to start with
- Fabipops — New York, NY
222 Broadway Fl 19, New York - Nuts On Clark Carmelcorn At Union Station — Chicago, IL
500 W Jackson Blvd, Chicago - Chubby Dips — Houston, TX
1100 Louisiana St, Houston - Waffelato — Las Vegas, NV
707 E Fremont St, Las Vegas - Snowya — Los Angeles, CA
123 Astronaut E S Onizuka St #103, Los Angeles - Extraordinary Desserts — San Diego, CA
1430 Union St, San Diego
Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.
How Savor Scout looks for it
The search reads for homemade, Basque, New York-style and Japanese, and lets you specify the style you want.
Looking in a particular city?
Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.
- New York, NY
- Los Angeles, CA
- Chicago, IL
- Houston, TX
- Philadelphia, PA
- Phoenix, AZ
- San Antonio, TX
- San Diego, CA
- Dallas, TX
- San Jose, CA
- Austin, TX
- Indianapolis, IN
- Jacksonville, FL
- San Francisco, CA
- Columbus, OH
- Charlotte, NC
- Fort Worth, TX
- Detroit, MI
- El Paso, TX
- Memphis, TN
- Seattle, WA
- Denver, CO
- Washington, DC
- Boston, MA
- Nashville, TN
- Baltimore, MD
- Oklahoma City, OK
- Louisville, KY
- Portland, OR
- Las Vegas, NV
- Milwaukee, WI
- Albuquerque, NM
- Tucson, AZ
- Fresno, CA
- Sacramento, CA
- Long Beach, CA
- Kansas City, MO
- Mesa, AZ
- Virginia Beach, VA
- Atlanta, GA
- Colorado Springs, CO
- Omaha, NE
- Raleigh, NC
- Miami, FL
- Oakland, CA
- Minneapolis, MN
- Tulsa, OK
- Cleveland, OH
- Wichita, KS
- Arlington, TX
- New Orleans, LA
- Bakersfield, CA
- Tampa, FL
- Honolulu, HI
- Aurora, CO
- Anaheim, CA
- Santa Ana, CA
- St. Louis, MO
- Riverside, CA
- Corpus Christi, TX
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