"I'd work on new menu items with a cook, behind the line. "When I ate at other restaurants during this time, I was able to take some of the more complex recipes, more expensive dishes, and bring them down to casual dining," he said. After a year of booming success running with their original menu, the Cheesecake Factory was looking to expand their offerings.
Over time, Overton realized he had a natural talent for for cooking, as well as running a restaurant in general. "We definitely had a fresh approach," he said, "but partly, that's because I didn't know what I was doing." They featured home fries instead of French fries, for example, because he had never used a deep fryer before. Overton stuck to burgers, salads, and sandwiches (alongside a slew of his mother's specialty cheesecakes, of course) and took measures to ensure he could still make anything on the menu, if needed. It's almost as if the founder of the Cheesecake Factory decided to just put literally anything into the menu, as long as people liked it.Īnd according to the founder of the Cheesecake Factory, that's exactly what happened. The menu defies definition, and circumvents any semblance of culinary consistency. If you order a filet mignon, your tablemate can counter with a BBQ pizza. You can have your chicken served with gravy and biscuits, or soaked in sweet and sour orange sauce. Or maybe instructions on how to safely store plutonium.īut the 21-page, 250-item tome - as you probably know - is the Cheesecake Factory's standard menu.Īnd it's not just the volume of items that's surprising: The apparently random variety of dishes that comprise the menu make it hard to peg what the Cheesecake Factory is.
I assumed the menu in front of me was a misplaced coffee table book. On my first trip to the Cheesecake Factory, the middle-class fanciest restaurant this side of Bonefish Grill, I have to admit, I was overwhelmed.
Can you have too much of a good thing? Economists, buffet-goers, fans of Boston-based sports teams, and many, many others have pondered this topic, ad nauseam, since… well, good things have existed (debatably, the first good thing was "fire," of which you can certainly have too much).
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