The Cheesecake Factory’s legendary menu, defined

The Cheesecake Factory menu is over 20 pages lengthy and comprises 250 objects. The menu was seemingly written by somebody who was hungry for every thing they may consider however couldn’t identify what they really needed at that second. The dishes, largely sandwiches and pastas and naturally cheesecakes, all have names and descriptions. Occasionally, a feminine first identify precedes the precise dish, indicating a private endorsement for a contemporary turkey sandwich or rooster and avocado salad from a “Sheila” or a “Renee” you’ve by no means met. The burgers usually are not hamburgers however Glamburgers. Getting shrimp scampi together with the steak Diane is called a “Factory Combination.”

There’s one thing uncanny in regards to the chain. The very mixture of phrases “The Cheesecake Factory” evokes the concept of a humble, blue-collar dessert diner, but each Cheesecake Factory seems to be like what would occur if a time-traveling Italian artisan drew Ancient Egypt from reminiscence. Somewhere between the rooster samosas, the Skinnylicious part, and the Americana Cheeseburger Glamburger®, between the towering columns, overstuffed cubicles, and the free refills on soda, the veil between sense and nonsense, lucidity and lunacy, and good and unhealthy dissolves.

This, I’m advised, is what makes the Cheesecake Factory a particular place — a courageous, unapologetic lack of self-awareness or pretense. The guidelines that govern common eating places don’t have any energy over the Cheesecake Factory. If there’s one rule on the Cheesecake Factory, it’s that the standard knowledge of the restaurant trade — protecting prices low, ideas easy, and menus beneath 200 objects — is supposed to be ignored.

Year after yr since 1978, the Cheesecake Factory has succeeded in abundance. Tens of hundreds of diners pile into its 211 North American areas (the corporate opened its 211th location in Corpus Christi, Texas, in December). In financial phrases, that amounted to round $750 million of income per quarter in 2021 and practically $3 billion per fiscal yr. The Cheesecake Factory is commonly heralded as one among if not the “favorite” sit-down chain restaurant to eat at.

And whereas it has captured hearts by fulfilling the promise of cheesecake and the assure of one thing for everybody, it stays a case examine in every thing a restaurant ought to by no means do. So how do they do it?

The Cheesecake Factory: No ideas, simply vibes

Plainly describing what a Cheesecake Factory seems to be like to somebody who has by no means been to 1 might trigger them to suppose you’re mendacity or attempting to trick them. That’s what occurs once you invite somebody to think about the unimaginable. Who would count on that you might stroll out of your native mall proper into a spot the place Egyptian columns flank Greco-Roman accents, the place mosaics buttress glass fixtures that appear like the Eye of Sauron? With hovering ceilings, inside palm bushes, and faux-wicker chairs (however, someway, no water characteristic), it’s a manufacturing facility solely of chaotic phantasmagoria.

The rhyme and purpose behind the restaurant’s decor is that Cheesecake Factories are supposed to evoke wealth and extravagance. And what higher exemplifies American opulence than the unrestrained acquisition of issues already deemed splendid from in every single place however residence? All these touches are markers of luxurious, options and silhouettes borrowed from the locations that wealthy folks see on their wealthy folks holidays. Smashing all of them collectively ought to, if aesthetic functioned like arithmetic, create essentially the most classiest place in historical past.

Photo by Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times through Getty Images

“Our goal was to give guests a sense they were getting a lot of value for their money. We wanted to give the place a feeling of a high-end restaurant and have the guests surprised by the relatively inexpensive pricing,” Rick McCormack, Cheesecake Factory’s former VP of design for over 13 years, defined to me. McCormack was a part of the corporate’s main enlargement within the ’90s, and went on to design for shoppers like MGM Resorts, BJ’s Restaurants, and Seasons 52.

The finishes, he mentioned, included actual granite and marble and the partitions had been hand-rubbed, creating a singular painted end. Murals had been accomplished by touring artisans, and the sunshine fixtures had been custom-blown. All these particulars had been to make the place really feel particular for diners, that they had been going to a vacation spot moderately than simply one other restaurant.

“We knew we were successful when we heard of people coming to the restaurant for special occasions — prom dinners, birthdays, anniversaries,” he advised me.

As you would possibly count on of a “special occasion” place, the Cheesecake Factory is well-loved. According to National Restaurant News, an American commerce publication that covers buyer developments, customers (millennials specifically) frequently rank the Cheesecake Factory as one among one of the best chain eating places, in addition to having one of the best ambiance and the highest quality meals. A series restaurant triple menace if there was ever one.

But for those who ask folks what it’s precisely that they love in regards to the Cheesecake Factory, past the seemingly common regard for the brown bread, the outcomes are somewhat extra combined. According to a particularly unofficial ballot amongst Cheesecake Factory fans I do know, one widespread chorus wasn’t a selected dish however moderately the vibe that the Cheesecake Factory offered, which is one thing like a simulacrum of tremendous eating, accessible for all ages, particularly youngsters. (Also key: the range, however extra on that in a minute.)

“I thought it was the pinnacle of a nice restaurant in high school,” one individual advised me. “A fun treat that wasn’t toooo fancy,” mentioned one other; “not that pricey compared to most nice restaurants,” mentioned a 3rd.

“I mean, the Cheesecake Factory is the Michelin three stars of chain restaurants,” pastry chef and Food Network star Zac Young advised me.

Young first encountered the Cheesecake Factory as a teen in Newton, Massachusetts, on the “fancy mall,” introduced there by a gaggle of girlfriends toting Prada baggage. He knew it was going to be a luxurious expertise. Girls with Prada baggage solely eat at locations with meals as excessive standing as Prada baggage. Nearly each individual I spoke to defined to me that Cheesecake Factories, like finicky vegetation in good soil, solely seem in “fancy” malls.

Restaurants exist which have higher meals than the Cheesecake Factory. Plenty have higher drinks. And sure, some have higher cheesecakes. But it appears there aren’t that many eating places that may out-vibe the Cheesecake Factory.

“The Cheesecake Factory went through a big expansion in the ’90s, which is when millennials started encountering it as kids. That allowed the brand to be connected to a deeply nostalgic time period in millennial life,” Hillary Dixler Canavan, the eating places editor at Eater, defined to me. Her concept as to why the restaurant has such a chokehold on Americans is that it’s extraordinarily fashionable with millennials.

For taxonomy functions, millennials are actually pushing 40, born between the years of 1981 and 1996. They’re the largest technology within the US, symbolize the vast majority of the workforce, and are highly effective customers. Their needs drive tradition, dictating the best way companies run and what they promote. In the Cheesecake Factory’s case, millennial fondness for the restaurant is integral to its recognition.

The ’90s represented financial prosperity for lots of Americans. Millennials had been teenagers and tweens then (pre-social media and simply on the beginnings of the mass web), and going out to eat and going out to malls had been the highlights of their social routine.

For a technology that entered the workforce in the course of the 2007 monetary disaster, the concept of going to a shopping mall with buddies and consuming on the Cheesecake Factory is a teenage dream. Call it regression or revisionist historical past, however consuming bottomless, sugary strawberry lemonade from large plastic cups was perhaps one of many instances after they felt completely blissful.

McCormack’s account strains up with Dixler Canavan’s concept about nostalgia. Millennials who went to the Cheesecake Factory, particularly for particular events, affiliate it with good emotions. If the restaurant is the place you spent your mother and father’ anniversary or your personal birthday, then it’s going to be tethered to happiness. Under the nice and cozy, gauzy filter that nostalgia gives, it’s arduous for Cheesecake Factory aficionados, particularly ones hardened by adulthoods that had been punctuated by numerous monetary crises, the fallout from 9/11, local weather change, and a pandemic, to not look again on the restaurant with out some form of wistful sentimentality. Going there now isn’t essentially about creating new experiences; it’s about chasing a sense you felt there earlier than.

The Cheesecake Factory menu, defined

In my casual survey of Factory followers, it wasn’t simply the recollections that stood out, however the completely beautiful selection. “It’s the ultimate our-group-can’t-agree-on-a-place restaurant,” mentioned one responder, “A mall food court with table service.”

“They have a very democratic menu,” mentioned one other, including that “there’s something for everyone at Cheesecake Factory.” At 20-plus pages (in keeping with a Cheesecake Factory spokesperson, menus fluctuate barely relying on location, which can change the web page depend), the menu is known, an icon.

And shopping the Cheesecake Factory’s authentic 1978 Beverly Hills menu is like taking a look at photos of a film star earlier than they acquired well-known. Its signature spiral binding is lacking, as are the paradise coladas. Ahi poke nachos wouldn’t be invented for many years. It didn’t goal to have one thing for everybody.

Courtesy of the Cheesecake Factory

The typeface — capped entrees and serifs galore — is essentially the identical, however the entire objects match on one web page, like a resumé. There are a mere 26 objects (with choices to customise), divided into three sections: “Specialties,” “Salads and Cold Plates,” and “Sandwich Creations.” Three completely different burgers are within the “specialties” part; they could appear extra at residence within the “sandwich creations” however I’m no arbiter of lunch meals taxonomy.

The enlargement, in keeping with the Cheesecake Factory’s origin story, occurred due to proprietor David Overton’s unwillingness to let every other native restaurant compete. As he advised Thrillist in 2018, “I didn’t want another restaurant to open down the block and take my business away,” and so started including something somebody would possibly need to order. The extra dishes — Mexican meals, completely different sorts of pasta— that they added to the unique 26, the extra folks responded positively.

Overton advised Thrillist in that very same interview that he wouldn’t have made the menu so large and expansive if he had recognized extra in regards to the trade and the way eating places are purported to function. But what he created was the Cheesecake Factory’s lasting legacy.

“Its success comes from offering something for everyone. A large group can go there and everyone will be able to find something they like at a reasonable cost,” McCormack, the previous VP of design, advised me.

Things that everybody likes normally contain cheese and carbs. According to a supply with deep data of gross sales, the most well-liked dish on the menu is Fettuccine Alfredo, which is ordered over 200,000 instances monthly. Avocado Egg Roll orders come out at about 140,000 in the identical interval, and Fried Mac and Cheese orders hover round 126,000.

“Sometimes people go after creativity and sometimes people just want something delicious that is not as intimidating,” Chef Brandon Cook, government chef of culinary analysis & growth (a.okay.a. one of many heads within the Cheesecake Factory take a look at kitchen), advised me. “And when you’ve got a great Fettuccine Alfredo — and our guests tell us that they love our version — we love it.”

Despite the truth that some meals have been on the roster for over 30 years, the menu does change. Items are swapped out and in each six months. Cook was coy about what occurred to my favourite entree from my youth, the fried shrimp scatter (he provided the admittedly related fried shrimp platter instead), however did clarify that getting a brand new merchandise onto the menu is an in depth course of.

The Cheesecake Factory nonetheless attracts inspiration from different eating places, together with from tremendous eating or trendy cooking. Cook defined to me that the restaurant’s extraordinarily fashionable fried mac and cheese balls are a riff and homage to French chef Alain Ducasse. “He’s a huge fan of the Cheesecake Factory,” Cook advised me.

For his informal idea restaurant Spoon, Ducasse created a mac and cheese terrine. Cook and his workforce had been in love with it not simply due to the way it tasted however as a result of “it was just so pretty.” But they understood that they couldn’t merely simply imitate it due to how complicated it was and the way it could go over with diners. Macaroni and cheese, Cook advised me, wasn’t even on the menu at this level. Through in depth trial and error, although, they had been capable of replicate it with a Cheesecake Factory spin.

“We were baking and it was super creamy. It was awesome. But we had no way to reheat it,” Cook advised me. “It was out of necessity that we basically made these balls and breaded and deep fried them because we had no other way to reheat them. When it started on the menu, it was dead last in our sales. And now it’s second place behind the avocado egg rolls in the appetizer category.”

Cook’s adventurous and in depth meals data (he spends each morning studying development studies and skimming Instagram to maintain up) and the concept that the Cheesecake Factory is so fashionable as a result of it’s constructed on nostalgia and a well-recognized mixture of carbs really feel like two various things. One pushes the restaurant ahead and the opposite requires the restaurant to remain the identical. But they’re really a lot nearer than it could seem.

“What I hope people think of with us is that we are trying to bring whatever America wants to eat to our menu,” Cook advised me. “So many other restaurant companies are driven by marketing departments, purchasing departments, and those are all necessary departments. But we’re chasing deliciousness.”

The thought of “chasing deliciousness” sounds as gooey as a deep-fried mac and cheese ball, however it is smart, too. Deliciousness isn’t logical or sensible; it doesn’t comply with a rule guide. Deliciousness might even be foolish.

The Cheesecake Factory is a marvel

Flip the hood of the Cheesecake Factory and also you’ll discover, as Cheesecake Factory workers will fortunately inform you, meals that doesn’t come from a bottle, neither is it merely thrown in a microwave.

Proteins, sauces, veggies, the dressings that go of their gigantic salads, the rooster marsala and mushrooms — it’s cooked on the spot. If there’s any a part of the Cheesecake Factory that resembles an industrial machine, it’s the a number of stations and line cooks wanted to create handmade meals for each meal. Ironically, the one meals that aren’t cooked contemporary are the cheesecakes and baked desserts; they’re made at an off-site bakery and shipped in.

“Their quality, their execution, and consistency across the country — it is always the same. And that’s a compliment! That’s impeccable,” pastry chef and Food Network star Young says, “The sauces, the dressings, everything is made in-house. That level of consistency doesn’t happen anywhere else.”

The sheer work is one thing Cook, the present take a look at kitchen head, is intimately conversant in. When he began on the Cheesecake Factory in February 2000, he was a line cook dinner. On the primary day of the job, he mentioned, he acquired a recipe guide that was “two inches”’ thick — a tome he assumed was for your complete restaurant. It was going to be a frightening job to memorize it, however doable. To Cook’s chagrin, it was simply the recipe guide for his particular unit, the sauté station.

He educated for 3 weeks earlier than he was allowed to cook dinner.

“My station alone had five cooks that would work just 16 burners,” Cook mentioned of his first expertise on the road. “It was one guy calling out the guests and starting dishes. It was one guy finishing and garnishing all the dishes, and three guys just cooking. That was just one station.”

Operating inside this intricate symphony was formidable to Cook. He thought, by the use of prior expertise at a Boston restaurant close to Fenway Park, that he’d be used to the quantity. When the Red Sox would play, that rush would plunge the kitchen right into a frenzy. But it nonetheless didn’t put together him for the Cheesecake Factory’s magnitude. The walk-in fridge, he mentioned, “was like Oz.”

Efficiency colliding with sheer variety of workers permits the restaurant to characteristic a menu that comprises a bit that features “appetizer salads,” “appetizers,” and “small plates and snacks,’’ a section that is completely different from the section containing “salads, flatbread pizzas, and lunch.” It’s how one can execute a menu the place ahi tuna on crispy rice shares a bit with a quesadilla and fried macaroni and cheese.

To say that making issues from scratch is uncommon in restaurant tradition — notably chain restaurant tradition — is an understatement. Squeezing ranch dressing from a bottle or opening up a bag of soup and reheating it’s so a lot simpler, cheaper, and sooner than making it your self. With every freshly made plate, there’s additionally the chance of mucking up a dish, and with that, sad diners.

“Think of it like a factory — the more touch points you have, the more opportunity you have to mess something up,” Young defined to me. “There’s a copious amount of time even for line cook training.”

Because of all these attainable factors of failure, altering that iconically huge menu isn’t any joke. Dishes should be capable to be replicated time and again, so Cook and his workforce must be deliberate with elements. “When it comes to new items, since it’s not just open a bag or open a box or, you know, scoop this or scoop that, we have to put a lot of weight on training and making sure that our staff members are comfortable making the dish before we even offer it on the menu.”

Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group through Getty Images

It’s not simply that the Cheesecake Factory is cooking home made meals for diners from the 250-plus merchandise menu every day — a frightening job in itself. But it’s additionally replicating that again and again, yr after yr, throughout 200-plus eating places.

“I have a deep love of chain restaurants period, but Cheesecake is the pinnacle. And the more experience I’ve had in the restaurant industry, it blows my mind even more that they can deliver day in and day out,” Young added.

Common sense for restaurant success is definitely the other of every thing the Cheesecake Factory does. Minimize labor, decrease elements, decrease every thing. Restaurants are costly to keep up and trimming extra helps survivability. The restaurant trade revolves across the thinnest of margins, and the widespread chorus (which must be acquainted to anybody who’s ever seen an episode of Kitchen Nightmares) is to simplify every thing.

The firm’s gigantic menu, dedication to creating its personal meals, and shut affiliation with a lavish, in-person eating expertise had been nearly its undoing within the first yr of the pandemic. Like many eating places, the Cheesecake Factory was hit unbelievably arduous when folks weren’t allowed to eat inside eating places. The Cheesecake Factory furloughed 41,000 of its hourly staff in March 2020. That similar yr, the SEC charged and settled with the corporate for “misleading disclosures” about the way it did not admit that it was shedding $6 million in money per week in the course of the pandemic.

The firm’s saving grace was that it pivoted to supply, turning its extensively educated servers into cashiers, and on and on. In a securities submitting that August, it mentioned it had rehired “the majority” of furloughed workers.

Last July, the corporate reported report income, $769 million, in its second quarter of 2021 and improved on that with $832.6 million in its second quarter of 2022. It’s a hard-to-fathom quantity that the corporate says may need been even larger had it not been tempered by inflation and lack of client spending.

“It totally defies restaurant logic. And it’s not to say that any one thing that they do is completely unique, it’s that they’re doing all these things at the same time,” Dixler Canavan, the Eater editor, advised me. “And I think the fact that that has worked for them just kind of suggests that they’ve cracked the code.”

The Cheesecake Factory breaks guidelines in a manner that the majority of us don’t really feel like we will. It’s virtually comedic: This factor that shouldn’t exist, particularly in a notoriously unforgiving trade, someway does. Better, fancier, extra coherent eating places have all bit the mud, but this mall girl-approved, Byzantine spectacle with a pseudo-industrial identify retains chugging alongside. At the Cheesecake Factory, “something for everyone” doesn’t simply imply a hilariously exhaustive menu served amid America’s most chaotic high-low aesthetic combine; it additionally means a home made mixture of consolation, nostalgia, and deliciousness that may’t assist however work.