The Cheesecake Factory

[mapsedge]

As an HSP, I find chaotic situations extremely hard to cope with. That makes having children a real challenge, but there I have [at least the illusion of] some control, which helps. There just comes a point where I have to remove myself from the situation and sit in the dark (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally) and process all of the input before returning to the fray.

We went to Cheesecake Factory Sunday, just Michelle and I. We hadn't had a date night in a long, long time, and decided that Seamlyne should take us out to dinner. I don't have any feelings about the place one way or the other: you will never hear me gush about how good their cheesecake is, so good in fact that they can do no wrong. That's just not me. I like my desserts subtle, and there is nothing subtle about a slice of cake the size of a distended water buffalo.

Our server couldn't describe the cheesecake to me. Since I've never had it, I wanted to know if their cheesecake was New York-style or Chicago-style. She didn't know that were different styles of cheesecake, and thus couldn't answer the question. (I still don't know.)

Michelle has told me that I'm very hard to go out to dinner with, and she's right: if I'm paying money to eat, I expect the food to be better than anything I could possibly make at home (and I'm a good cook), and I expect the service to be top-shelf.

The company was good: we needed the time alone and made good use of it to just relax and enjoy a meal together. The food was phenomenal. Truly. I had Steak Diane, beef medalions encrusted with peppercorns and served with a mushroom and wine sauce. Michelle had the Chicken Marsala. The coffee was good (although their tiramisu was a disappointment). I had a view of the kitchen, and got to watch the flames from the sauté pans.

So, what do high-sensitivity and The Cheesecake Factory have in common?

That restaurant has the most agressive ambience I've ever experienced, short of Lambert's Cafe in Sikeston. If I go to Cracker Barrel, I expect the place to be noisy. I wasn't expecting T.C.F. to have a noise level so high that conversation was almost impossible. It was an uncomfortable auditory assault of screechy jazz played too loud, servers and customers trying to make themselves heard over it and each other. We took our time over dinner (since we never get to), but it was almost a relief to step out onto the sidewalk, to the muted din of traffic noise.

Note to T.C.F. management: yours is a facility filled with hard, accoustically reflective surfaces. I'm coming for the food and the company, not the Musak.

Comments

[motherpockets.livejournal.com]

I like Olive Garden's tiramisu. And I, too, am not particularly impressed by the Cheesecake Factory's cheesecakes, with their 942 varieties and overuse of whipped cream on all of them! Tasty, yeah, but not so much that I swoon over them. Their dinners usually are excellent, tho, and I like the steak diane and many other things on their very nicely varied menu (where they don't try to do 942 versions of the same dish!). We went there for Mother's Day, and it was packed and noisy. Didn't know it was that way the rest of the time. Hadn't been there in ages before that. We also had trouble with our server not knowing what something was, as I recall, but I believe she went and asked!

[billthetailor.livejournal.com]

I was astonished by the amount of whipped cream they used! I like whipped cream, but gawddamn, I don't expect an amount of it equal in volume to the rest of the dessert! Michelle can't stand the stuff, and after piling her share onto my plate, my tiramisu (I know that's what it was, because that's what it said in the menu not because it actually resembled tiramisu) was completely dwarfed.

[aerie13.livejournal.com]

I, on the other hand, would order a dessert of only whipped cream if it were on the menu. :-P