The Wallflower Report

So last week we went to the mall here and ended up eating at The Cheesecake Factory. Do not let the name fool you: the so-called “factory” is actually a restaurant. Otherwise we probably wouldn’t have eaten there. I think they call themselves a factory because they want to emphasize that their cheesecakes are made by hand. It’s like reverse pscyhology, you know? Very tricky.

Another tricky thing is restaurant decor. Like if you’re one of those “fast casual” restaurants like Panera Bread or Qdoba or Noodles & Associates L.L.C., you have to decorate your restaurant in ways that downplay the fact that you’re part of a huge multinational chain owned by McDonald’s or somebody, so you have to put up things about environmental responsibility and fair trade and organic food and whole grains and stuff everywhere to make yourself look all “indy.”

I think Chipotle does this best. Have you ever eaten at Chipotle? They’ve got like brown paper and corrugated sheet metal everywhere for that rough, unfinished look. The only time I’ve ever seen a restaurant that beat them for that image was when I wandered into a Little Caesar’s that wasn’t actually open yet.

Anyway, the Cheesecake Factory is a sit-down restaurant, so they don’t have that kind of decor.

You know, I’ve never understood all these terms. I mean, I know what they mean, but you can still sit down in a fast food place. And shouldn’t a “fast casual” restaurant somehow be more casual than a fast food restaurant, instead of having actual dishes and metal flatware and environmentally conscious messages printed on the disposable soda cups? “Fast Semi-Formal” maybe, though I guess that could confuse patrons into thinking it’s a fast sempahore restaurant, if they were hard of hearing and knew what a semaphore was.

Um. Anyway, so…

The Cheesecake Factory is decorated in a style all its own, a style which can only be described as “early American scary Egyptian faces and hanging glass candy corn.” Also, there were these weird concave thingies hanging from the ceiling with murals of vaguely Greco-Roman people hanging out with the planets and stars and junk. Also, the vaguely Greco-Roman people were mostly on fire, for some reason.

It kind of reminded me of when I was fourth grade and we went to the Nebraska State Capitol and there were all these tiled mosaics of nature and the four elements or directions or whatever in order to symbolize that farmers are a cowardly and superstitious lot and that nature is boring.

I’m really not sure what they were going for.

But the food was pretty good, and there was plenty of it even without eating off other people’s plates. Like, you ever go to a fancy restaurant because you heard the food was très magnifique, and you order something that looks good on the menu but then it comes and the portions are really tiny? Well, that’s because “très magnifique” is French for “under three times magnification”. Yeah. Don’t be fooled.

Anyway, Cheesecake Factory doesn’t have that problem. The portions are seriously huge. But they like to put asparagus on everything, for some reason. I had to look carefully to find something that didn’t have any and ended up getting the miso salmon, which is Japanese for “me so salmon!” and it really was.

The only problem was that the chef or whatever had arranged it so that salmon was on top of a tower of sticky rice surrounded by a moat of cream sauce and I was totally going to do that myself. What’s the point of ordering food if somebody else has already played with it? Though I guess if you were in a hurry or something then pre-played-with food could be a handy thing to have. That might be part of their appeal.

Considering that they’re supposed to be famous for their cheesecakes, I thought it was a little bit suspicious that they’d have such huge entrées (which, of course, literally means “on trays”, and so technically would fit better at the fast casual places) and that they’d put a basket of bread on each table and keep refilling it.

Why were they so invested in making sure that diners got full? What are they trying to hide. Who benefits, or as they say in Latin America, cui bono?

The obvious explanation is that there isn’t any cheesecake.

Shocking, rigt? But there’s no other possible explanation.

I decided to call their little bluff and ordered a piece of tiramu… timir… espresso flavored cheeecake to go. My preliminary results are that they have cheesecake and it is good, but I think this is too important not to investigate more thoroughly.

Just as soon as I can secure some funding from Judy’s purse.

~Ariella Rasputin Wallflower

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.