Walnut Creek's The Sweet Spot and its must-try desserts

And not a bad way to start the morning, huh? Crepes, Dubai chocolates, strawberry cups, and now Japanese cream sandos. There's always something sweet happening at the Sweet Spot in Walnut Creek. The Desert Shot opened in May of 2025 and continues to expand its menu with fun flavors and eye-catching treats. And we have some of that with you this morning. Joining me right next to me, I have Arian Massad, the owner of the Sweet Spot. He's joining us here on the show to talk a lot about where this inspiration comes from. Arian, thanks for being here. Thank you for having me. The inspiration, it comes from all over. I've just seen it. I've seen it in some places in New York, some places in Canada, but I grew up in the Bay Area, and I've never seen any dessert like this. I always see a bunch of ice cream shops, but nothing with the crepes and the pancakes. I've never seen anything like this, so I decided to open it, and it's been going well for me ever since. Now, years ago, you were a D1 football player, And a guy playing D1 football, you don't often think is a guy who knows how to bake stuff like this. So tell me, how did you transition out of football into this? Well, growing up, I always loved food. I would always cook at home, bake at home. Football, I love football. I played football growing up. I played three years in college. I was at Eastern Kentucky, but it just wasn't working out for me. I didn't want to gamble my future on football working out. So I decided to take a little break and try this dessert concept. and it's been working out so I took off and I've been doing it ever since I haven't gone back to football you're definitely right there is this trend that's been going on I think over the last 10 years where these really uh trendy instagrammable desserts were flying by I mean I think about cakes and pops uh in New York City and now this here in the Bay Area what made you think this version of it crepes and these strawberry cups uh just like what I said originally I haven't seen around here and uh it just does really good on social media that kind of took us off at first we started posting videos of our desserts and everything on social media and we built a big social media presence before we even opened so that helped us a lot uh just being able to use instagram and what's trending nowadays just helped us really push the business as we were opening you've got your right hand man right here with you uh there's a demo you want to do just kind to show us how tasty and fun these things can can look so do what you got to do here and then aria i want to ask you are there any lessons and things that you learned in football that are now applying to this part of your life yes uh football actually has been helping me a lot it's i would say it taught me how to keep pushing you know business is really really stressful you know there's ups and downs something might happen you might not be able to open today uh football kind of taught me no matter what's happening with business and life, just keep pushing forward. And also teamwork was a big thing football taught me. Just being able to work with a group of people and everyone get along and everyone be focused on the same goal, that's something that's really been helping me in business. What did you play in football? What position? I played defensive end. You were defensive end. Okay, so you're always taking a hit or taking a hit for somebody else here. Kind of the same thing what you would do in a business. How has business been? It's been great. I mean, we took off on social media, and everything's been great. We're releasing new items. Customers have been loving it. A lot of good reviews, everything. Nothing I can complain about, honestly. So tell us what he's making here. What has he been doing? Here he's making actually our most popular item. This is what does the best. It's our Dubai Chocolate Strawberry Cup. It's strawberries cut in half. We have this house-made kunafa. It's like a shredded crispy dough, and then we top it off with Nutella and pistachio cream. Oof, okay. And where did that idea come from? Is that a creation that you're familiar with, or you kind of just made it up? The Dubai chocolate was like a flavor that was really trendy at the time. It's with the pistachio cream and the kataifi. We've seen people put it on the strawberries, and we decided to try it in our own style, and people have been loving it. So say we want to check this out, right? Do you guys have any hours that are unique, or how do we find you? Yeah, that's also what really stands out about our business. We love to open late, so Friday, Saturdays, we're open until 1 in the morning. Oh, wow, okay. And regularly just 11 p.m., but we're always open late. We're open whenever. We're on DoorDash, everything. And where do we find you? In Walnut Creek. Walnut Creek. Give me Crossroads, Plaza. 1512 Sunnyvale Avenue in Walnut Creek. And then if we want to join in on that social media following, too. We're going to be the sweet spot, Walnut Creek, on Instagram and TikTok. All right. All right, Alan, thanks so much for being here with us, my friend. Thank you for joining us, too. I obviously got to take a bite of one of these things here. Tiny, looks like a little mini pancake. It's a mini pancake here, a little mini crepe. Oh, and that's going to hit the spot at 11 a.m. or 11 p.m. Ariane Masud, the owner of The Sweet Spot in Walnut Creek. Thank you so much, both of you, for being here. Time now at 8.50. Andre, we've got some tasty stuff.