- 7 minutes ago
We went behind the scenes to see how the Cheesecake Factory consistently executes such a massive menu and makes it profitable.
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00:01The Cheesecake Factory has more than 250 items on its menu.
00:07That's one of the largest selections of any U.S. chain.
00:10While many restaurants across the U.S. are cutting dishes as ingredient prices rise,
00:15the Cheesecake Factory is doing the opposite, adding more than 10 new plates a year.
00:20Chefs make nearly everything from scratch daily, including 100 different sauces.
00:27There's so many challenges when you're making everything fresh.
00:30The restaurant relies on Jay Hinson, who's worked at the company for 28 years to train chefs on the new
00:36dishes.
00:37The moment we start thinking something's easy is when we make mistakes.
00:41I want to make sure potatoes are perfect.
00:43I'm still not getting hot mash. I'm still pumped.
00:46The Cheesecake Factory's more is more strategy is working.
00:50Sales have increased each year since 2020.
00:53At a time when other sit-down restaurants are struggling.
00:56We went behind the scenes to see what it takes to keep the Cheesecake Factory's kitchens running,
01:01and how it makes such a massive menu profitable.
01:04This menu is a book. This is like a chapter book.
01:09Chefs start racing to chop, slice, and cook, hours before any customers show up.
01:14You get your list, put your head down, and you get your work done.
01:18You're being meticulous about weighing and measuring and cutting everything precisely to hit the correct flavor profile.
01:26They'll do all this prep from five stations, slicing dozens of items a day, including every piece of cheese, vegetable,
01:33and meat.
01:34A little thicker. That's too thin. Slice this too thin. Starts to eat dry as it hits the air temperature.
01:40If you slice it too thick, it eats chewy.
01:42At this station, Juan Carlo Diaz is in charge of making a hundred-plus dips, dressings, and sauces, like marinara.
01:50He roasts the tomatoes in the oven, blends them together with fresh basil and garlic,
01:57and mixes all of the ingredients in this fat.
02:03Once the sauce is complete, Juan sets aside a small amount to be taste tested.
02:08That's part of it. One of the best I try. Nice shot, Chef.
02:12Joel Lopez oversees quality control.
02:15He'll try the foods prep today to make sure they're up to the chain standard.
02:18Do you have a good start of trying everything?
02:20You know, we do it for so long, it becomes a habit.
02:23And when something doesn't look right right away, you can identify it.
02:26Nice and crispy. Great amount.
02:30See? Perfecto.
02:35Once Joel approves the prepped ingredients, staff store them in here.
02:38They'll cook it all within the next seven days.
02:40The walk-in box is set up exactly like our stations are in the prep kitchen.
02:46Sauce station has a segment, slicer, salad, and production.
02:50The secret to prepping food fast is having organization, right?
02:55When we watch a cook run from their station to a walk-in box, back to their station, that's all
03:02dead time.
03:03To speed things up and limit cooking mistakes, chefs have screens at their stations
03:07that walk them through each dish step-by-step.
03:11At 9 a.m., the line cooks arrive, and things start heating up.
03:15Ingredients and prepped items, like macaroni cheese balls and dumplings,
03:19are sectioned off and labeled inside drawers below each station.
03:23Once an entree is ordered, chefs have just 15 minutes to get it out,
03:28and seven minutes for appetizers.
03:30How many items can we really execute off of a station?
03:34That becomes a juggling act for us.
03:37When the restaurant opens at 11.30, it's go time.
03:40The chain's algorithm decides when to send an order to a station.
03:44Since a steak takes longer to cook, it'll appear on the screen earlier than a dish like orange chicken.
03:50That way, everything from one order hits the window at the same time.
03:54But even with strict organization and the timed-out algorithm,
03:57some things slip through the cracks.
03:59Tickets turn orange when chefs are running out of time, like with these nachos.
04:03Cooks make the chips from scratch and have to add the right balance of sauces and toppings.
04:09Too much could make it soggy.
04:11Too little might throw off the balance of sweet, spicy, and acidic flavors.
04:15This dish is new to the menu, so the chefs are running a little slower than usual.
04:19If the plate is past due, the ticket turns red.
04:23This might happen at one of the harder stations, pasta, because chefs monitor up to 10 pans at once.
04:29Or at the grill station, where meats require a chef's full attention.
04:33Once the buns go down and you drop the meat onto the grill, absolutely every movement at that point counts.
04:41If you turn around, you overseer the bottom of the meat, the burger buns will not steam the right way.
04:46If staff can't hit their deadlines, a kitchen manager might join the line to help.
04:50But if everything's running smoothly, managers like Joel will watch from this area, called The Pass.
04:56From here, Joel has to give his final stamp of approval before anything leaves the kitchen.
05:01See how it's a little bit of sauce on the side?
05:03Make sure it's nice and clean. Nice golden brown.
05:06I want to see those layers and haystack as high as possible.
05:09You want to see the best by four, right?
05:11We make sure the asparagus are all facing the same direction, okay?
05:14He measures the temperatures.
05:16I'm still not getting hot mashed. It's still cold.
05:18Portion sizes.
05:20Nine-ounce roll, five and a half cooked, right?
05:22The chicken looks a little small.
05:24And taste tests everything.
05:26Alex, can I taste your pasta water? Let me see how it is.
05:30Yeah, it needs more salt, Alex.
05:32All 250 menu items come from this one kitchen.
05:37But the Cheesecake Factory's menu wasn't always this long.
05:41It started out as a family-owned bakery, and it made only one thing.
05:45Cheesecake.
05:46During the 1940s, Evelyn Overton made and sold cheesecakes in Detroit.
05:51But her business never really took off.
05:52So she moved the wholesale bakery to a bigger market, Los Angeles.
05:57David Overton, Evelyn's son, helped out with the business.
06:00They offered a dozen varieties of cheesecake to restaurateurs.
06:03But the new flavors failed to catch on in restaurants.
06:06They didn't see the reason to have more than one flavor of cheesecake.
06:11So in 1978, David took a risk.
06:13He opened the first Cheesecake Factory and shifted the brand's focus to full-service dining.
06:19He really thought, you know, I'll show those restaurant tours.
06:22But he had no previous experience running a restaurant.
06:25On opening day, he was so nervous he didn't unlock the doors until 2 p.m. to avoid the lunch
06:30rush.
06:31When he finally opened the doors, they were full within 10 minutes.
06:35The original menu had 60 items, mostly things he knew how to cook himself, like hamburgers and quiche.
06:40He skipped fries because he didn't know how to use a fryer.
06:43It was that lack of experience that led him to create a menu made from scratch.
06:50And he kind of jokes, if a cook ever walked out and he had to jump on the line, he
06:55could cook things.
06:56There was a salad bar, an espresso station, and a massive dessert menu.
07:01It quickly caught on with the American middle class, which peaked at roughly half the U.S. population in the
07:07decade the Cheesecake Factory opened.
07:09There really were, in the area, high-end restaurants and then kind of fast food, but there was really nothing
07:15in the middle.
07:16And David purposely created a restaurant that was very much in the middle.
07:20And as more restaurants across the country began using frozen food and microwaves,
07:25the Cheesecake Factory's made-from-scratch cooking struck a chord.
07:28Over the next 50 years, David would go on to open 252 more locations around the world, and he never
07:35stopped adding to the menu.
07:36Now the Cheesecake Factory has one of the largest menus of any major U.S. food chain.
07:41Our kitchen operations team has really put their foot down and told David,
07:47250 items, it's not going to be ever getting much larger than that, just from a sheer complexity standpoint.
07:53But that hasn't stopped the Cheesecake Factory from adding recipes.
07:57The chain rolls out new items twice a year.
08:00They replace older ones that are underperforming, so the menu doesn't get any bigger.
08:04While all the cheesecakes are made at factories in Los Angeles and North Carolina and sent to the restaurants frozen,
08:11all the other dishes are largely made on site.
08:14It's Jay's job to figure out if new dishes can actually work on this team's already chaotic restaurant stoves.
08:20To get 18 new items on the menu, we probably tasted over 100 items.
08:26What do you think makes a good menu item?
08:28It's when you try to eat the entire dish, and that experience, every bite is a little different.
08:33It takes you on a roller coaster ride.
08:34On average, it takes up to 16 weeks to develop new dishes.
08:38Once they're ready for rollout, select staff from across the country head to the California headquarters.
08:43They'll spend one week learning how to make the new plates.
08:46Then they'll head back and train their kitchen staff on how to do it.
08:50It'll take up to five days to get everyone up to speed.
08:53But can they actually pull off all of these different types of cuisines?
08:57I put them to the test and tried the food out for myself.
09:00This menu is a book.
09:02Twenty-two pages.
09:04On one hand, you had fried macaroni cheese balls.
09:07Very American.
09:09And right above it, you have some egg rolls, Thai chili shrimp, all over the map.
09:14First, I tried two of their most popular dishes, the pickle fries and avocado rolls.
09:21There's a lot of pickle inside.
09:23I think most pickle fries, it's mostly breading.
09:26Tastes good.
09:28Mmm.
09:29It's great.
09:30It's literally guacamole just like in a fried crust.
09:33Mmm.
09:34I can see why they're a favorite.
09:35Next, I sampled out some of the most popular and the newest entrees.
09:39Okay, so now when you see that $30 price tag, you start understanding that this actually goes a lot further
09:46than you would have thought.
09:47I mean, this is like seven weeks worth of food right here.
09:50The tuna poke bowl, new to the menu this year, was one of my favorite things on the table.
09:57Mmm.
09:58That's so good.
09:59I could easily down that all by myself.
10:01This is raw fish at the Cheesecake Factory.
10:04So, of course, if you went to a restaurant that specialized in poke bowls, you might get something like a
10:09little better.
10:10But then you wouldn't be able to get this jambalaya pasta.
10:12So I think that's where Cheesecake Factory sets itself apart, is that you can get really good level food in
10:18all of these very wacky categories.
10:20And it's good.
10:22I'll be the first to admit, I'm kind of surprised by that.
10:25But nowadays, menus this large are uncommon in the rest of the industry.
10:30Starbucks has cut down its menu by 30 percent.
10:33Chili's by 25 percent.
10:35And Outback, nearly 20 percent.
10:37It's a trend that started during the pandemic.
10:39This is an industry where margins are tight.
10:43One to two percent savings is massive.
10:46So if you're cutting three ingredients and it saves you two percent on labor operations and ingredients, it could be
10:54millions of dollars in savings.
10:56Now, as the prices of ingredients like beef and lettuce keep climbing, many restaurants are charging more.
11:02From 2020 to 2025, menu prices at U.S. restaurant chains increased by an average of 42 percent.
11:09IHOP's menu prices went up by 82 percent.
11:12Texas Roadhouses by 46.
11:14And the Cheesecake Factory's by 40.
11:16Now, nearly 40 percent of Americans are dining out less.
11:20So when diners do choose to go out, they're picking places with bigger portions.
11:24If you're going to spend $15, $20 on a meal from McDonald's, but it's going to last you one meal.
11:30Or if you spend $23 to $25 on a meal from Cheesecake Factory, but you've got bread, you've got a
11:36portion that's going to feed you for dinner and lunch the next day.
11:38The value is there.
11:40The portions are huge.
11:42In Manhattan, a slice of cake would probably be the size of this little mound of whipped cream.
11:47But here, I mean, that's like easily shareable with three people for $13.
11:52The Cheesecake Factory's design also stands out.
11:55Most chains have gone through redesigns like Starbucks, Red Lobster, Subway.
12:00But this pretty much looks the same as it was when I was in middle school.
12:04And I think that leans heavily into this nostalgia that we're all sort of craving in our lives right now.
12:08It feels like an experience.
12:10And that experience helps customers stay longer and order more.
12:14And you have to think most people are probably ordering some kind of dessert when at the Cheesecake Factory.
12:20For restaurants, drinks and desserts are often the most profitable items on the menu.
12:25At the Cheesecake Factory alone, cake slices make up an estimated 17% of the chain's sales in 2025.
12:31It's kind of brilliant for a restaurant chain to completely brand itself around one of the highest margin things on
12:39the menu.
12:39And these desserts range from $11 to $13.
12:42So you're looking about half the price of a main dish.
12:46And this is very low effort for the kitchen.
12:49The chain also saves money by using the same ingredients across multiple menu items.
12:55Like these wonton wrappers.
12:57They show up in the Asian salad, egg rolls and Asian nachos.
13:02Now, the Cheesecake Factory is one of the highest grossing restaurant chains in the U.S.
13:07One location can bring in over $12 million in gross revenue annually.
13:12Compare that to Texas Roadhouse, which earns just shy of $8 million a year per location.
13:17Or Chili's, which brings in an estimated $5 million.
13:21In the first quarter of 2026, the Cheesecake Factory beat Wall Street expectations,
13:25with average weekly sales reaching an all-time high.
13:29If you have a large family and one kid wants pizza, someone else wants a burger,
13:34dad wants a steak, mom wants a pasta, you can throw Cheesecake Factory's name out there
13:38and you can have the entire family meet their goals.
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