Factory Food

After the Boston Marathon, our team's annual tradition is victory dinner at the Cheesecake Factory - it's conveniently located across from the hotel and has the infamous extensive menu to cater to the many tastes of a large group and massive portion sizes to feed the athletes' appetites post-race. A logical choice.

But let's be honest, the Cheesecake Factory is in fact a factory: it manufactures food in massive quantities without the craftsmanship of an independent artisan (i.e. gourmet cuisine.) The endless menu is both its appeal and it's downfall - offering salads, pasta, chicken, fish, sandwiches, you name it, it's a phonebook there are so many pages. Yet the Cheesecake Factory's variety of options means that it makes literally hundreds of mediocre dishes rather than focusing on perfecting a select number, and churns it out in enormous quantities to mask the food's average quality and somewhat justify the prices.

The menu has diversified to include "low calorie" options - while 600 calories for a salad hardly seems worth mentioning, one must take into account the gargantuous regular salads; don't be fooled into thinking you're eating healthy by ordering a salad here, as they come on plates larger than your head and come dowsed in salad dressing. Always ask for dressing on the side. My longtime favorites at the Cheesecake Factory were always the salads - either the Santa Fe or the Chinese Chicken Salad - but found that the leftovers often wilted before I could finish it all. Last night I opted for an "appetizer-sized" salad to avoid this, and of course it was still large. And not thrilling.

The main issue with the Fresh Vegetable Salad, I felt, was there was frankly too much lettuce in proportion to the rest of the vegetables; the attempt to bulk up the dish resulted in some less-than-fresh romaine. The pieces of green beans and asparagus were too small, and while the combination of roasted beets and white cheddar was interesting, the taste was dwarfed by lettuce. I was intrigued by the salad's pomegranate vinaigrette and liked the tang it provided, but found the raw edamame out of place, a failed attempt at Asian fusion. Luckily there are still dozens of other salads to try ... right?

So why do people wait for two hours at a crowded, noisy restaurant with the same decor as every other location of the chain, to be bombarded by 200 choices on the menu and in a panic end up picking something because they see the server coming back? That's easy. The cheesecake.