The whole table was happy (with the possible exception of Ethan, aged sixteen, who picked the onions out of his Hawaiian pizza).
But the Cheesecake Factory knows its customers. No doubt everything we ordered was sweeter, fattier, and bigger than it had to be. My beets were crisp and fresh, the hummus creamy, the salmon like butter in my mouth. And yet nothing smacked of mass production.
I pictured semi-frozen bags of beet salad shipped from Mexico, buckets of precooked pasta and production-line hummus, fish from a box. The chain serves more than eighty million people per year. As for the food-can I say this without losing forever my chance of getting a reservation at Per Se?-it was delicious. They wear all white (crisp white oxford shirt, pants, apron, sneakers) and try to make you feel as if it were a special night out. The décor is fancy, in an accessible, Disney-cruise-ship sort of way: faux Egyptian columns, earth-tone murals, vaulted ceilings. The typical entrée is under fifteen dollars. The place is huge, but it’s invariably packed, and you can see why. I got a beet salad with goat cheese, white-bean hummus and warm flatbread, and the miso salmon.
The kids ordered mostly comfort food-pot stickers, mini crab cakes, teriyaki chicken, Hawaiian pizza, pasta carbonara. There’s wine and wasabi-crusted ahi tuna, but there’s also buffalo wings and Bud Light. It’s a linen-napkin-and-tablecloth sort of place, but with something for everyone. You may know the chain: a hundred and sixty restaurants with a catalogue-like menu that, when I did a count, listed three hundred and eight dinner items (including the forty-nine on the “Skinnylicious” menu), plus a hundred and twenty-four choices of beverage. It was Saturday night, and I was at the local Cheesecake Factory with my two teen-age daughters and three of their friends. Medicine has long resisted the productivity revolutions that transformed other industries.
0 kommentar(er)
