Hiatus Cheesecake Owner on His Love for the Decadent Dessert

In the early aughts, Matthew Featherstone was juggling his role as one-fourth of The Featherstones—a local songwriting team that includes his brothers, Justin and Christopher, and his cousin William—with area bartending jobs to help make ends meet.

On the side, and just for fun, he’d always enjoyed making cheesecakes for family and friends. One day in 2016, while working at Grace’s Mandarin, an Asian-fusion spot in National Harbor, he brought a vanilla-bean cheesecake to share with coworkers.

“They were so impressed, they said I should go into business,” recalls Featherstone, who has collaborated with artists including Dru Hill, Nicki Minaj, Chris Brown, and Iggy Azalea.

By 2016, he had founded Hiatus Cheesecake. “The owner at Grace’s allowed me to have an insert in the dessert menu that told the story of Hiatus,” Featherstone says. “During that process, I learned that most restaurants that couldn’t afford a pastry chef were outsourcing dessert to distributors like Sysco—in 2019, Sysco became my first customer.”

From there, he developed the retail side of Hiatus and his creations—made at B-More Kitchen in Govans—were soon stocked on the shelves at Whole Foods markets in the Mid-Atlantic.

More recently, Featherstone established a footprint in scores of Kroger Markets with plans to expand to a few hundred stores within the year. “I love food, I love baking,” says Featherstone. “I could sit and read recipes all day.”

How did you get into baking?
My mom baked every day. We were a big family. It was me, my brothers, my sister, my father, and grandfather living together on the west side of Baltimore near Pimlico. We were eating so much bread, so she learned how to make bread herself, including croissants, dinner rolls, and French baguettes. I’d be in the kitchen with her baking the bread that she was making.

Why cheesecake?
One day, my cousin came in with a cheesecake from The Cheesecake Factory. I had never tried cheesecake before. At that moment, I became obsessed with cheesecake. I went into one of my mom’s cookbooks, found a recipe, and made my first cheesecake—that was the summer of eighth grade. The first cheesecake I did was espresso. After that, I got into cheesecakes topped with fruit. Eventually it got around that I was pretty good at making cheesecake, so friends and family asked me= to make them for different events.

What inspired the name of your company?
They are 2.75-inch round cheesecakes, so the portions sizes are single servings. I called it Hiatus because it represents a temporary break from your diet.

How do you develop your fantastical flavors?
In bartending, we have drinks that are layered and look really cool. I wanted to bring that concept of layering drinks to layers of cake. For example, I decided to do a vanilla-bean cheesecake, layer it with sweet potato pie, and layer that with Swiss buttercream. That became the sweet potato cake.

So, what’s your favorite flavor?
Every now and then, I grab caramel carrot cake from the stash. It has a carrot cake cheesecake over a carrot cake and the whole thing is drenched in salted bourbon caramel. But I have a love for every cheesecake that I have created—they are all my cheesecake children.