Photo by @mikejchau
A cake business that started as a side project between two friends in a New Jersey apartment has spent the past couple months quietly building a following on the Upper East Side. It’s racked up tons of views on TikTok and Instagram in that time. Plenty of neighbors still haven’t spotted it, though, and that’s partly by design, because it doesn’t have a shop of its own.
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Soaked Bar opened a permanent counter inside the Nuts Factory at 1030 Third Avenue, on the corner of East 61st Street, on Saturday, June 27. It keeps the same hours as the store around it, 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. daily.The pitch is right there in the name. Soaked Bar makes tres leches, the milk-soaked sponge cake that’s a staple across Latin America, and sells it by the box rather than by the slice. The lineup on Soaked Bar’s site runs to more than a dozen signature flavors, including pistachio, Biscoff, dulce de leche, coconut, cherry, cinnamon, confetti cake and one called Oreo milkshake, with additional flavors rotating in every month. There’s a four-cake box for anyone who can’t narrow it down. Smoothies have been added to the menu as well, according to The Infatuation.
The Third Avenue counter is the brand’s first brick-and-mortar location, and getting there took about two years. Soaked Bar launched in 2024 out of a Jersey City apartment, according to accounts circulating on social media, and grew the way a lot of food businesses do now, through weekly online drops that sold out and word of mouth that did the rest. One of the founders has described the arc in his own posts, from selling cakes out of the apartment to opening in New York. The brand identifies itself as Dominican-owned and still has a New Jersey presence.
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Orders can be placed ahead of time online for scheduled pickup, which is worth knowing on a weekend. The company has also started turning up at industry events, including a New York Fashion Week party this year, a sign it’s aiming at something bigger than a single counter.The host is worth a mention too. Nuts Factory, a family-run business selling roasted nuts, dried fruit, spices, halva and a great deal of Dubai chocolate, chose this same Third Avenue corner for its first American store before expanding across the city. It now runs about a dozen shops in New York, plus locations in New Jersey and Massachusetts.
