Catering To the Melting Pot

By Jyoti Thottam/ Calabasas Hills

Is America ready for the melted anchovy? That's the question on the table this afternoon in the gleaming research and development kitchen of the Cheesecake Factory in Calabasas Hills, Calif. Karl Matz, 31, a former chef at Spago with the earnest good looks of an Eagle Scout, has reluctantly removed the salty little fish from his pasta puttanesca, traditionally made with tomatoes, anchovies, olives, capers and dried red chilis, and sets plates of rigatoni cloaked in the sauce onto a black-marble counter. David Overton, Cheesecake's founder, CEO and ultimate tasting authority, picks up one of the half a dozen forks arrayed for this tasting session and takes a bite. He is wondering about the anchovies. "Karl wanted to put them in," he says. "But some people are allergic to fish." And Overton doesn't want to scare off the anchovy averse who don't realize the fish melt into the tomatoes as they cook, leaving behind a pungent bite that this sauce is missing. "You think it needs more capers?" he asks. Perhaps their tangy saltiness will compensate.

With that, a dish that traces its roots to the prostitutes of Naples (legend says they made the spicy dish for their clients) moves one step closer to the malls of America. Every six months, the restaurant's R&D chefs winnow hundreds of ideas for new menu items--the Cheesecake Factory's version of American Idol--and Matz's puttanesca has reached the finals. After a few years of rounds that added Asian, Caribbean and Latin American flavors to the menu, this round of revisions will reimagine familiar classics like spinach salad, corned-beef hash and spaghetti with red sauce; the puttanesca is a twist on marinara. The winners will debut on Cheesecake Factory menus later this month.

The evolving menus do more than just keep customers coming back. (With more than $1 billion in sales from 105 restaurants in 2005, the Cheesecake Factory is by far the most productive "casual-dining" chain in the country, generating $970 for every square foot of restaurant space.) Like an annual family portrait, every new Cheesecake Factory menu holds up a mirror to the American palate, revealing how it has grown and changed. When Vietnamese summer rolls appear alongside buffalo wings, "it shows the customers that those items are mainstream," says Karen Cathey, incoming chair of the American Institute of Wine and Food. "They've modernized American food," says Clark Wolf, a food and restaurant consultant, and the chain's national reach gives every new dish leverage over millions of American taste buds. With its kitchen-sink menu and gargantuan portions, the Cheesecake Factory is big-tent cuisine at its most expansive. It is a restaurant where everything is included but nothing is authentic, and it is changing the way we think about American food.

The first Cheesecake Factory was little more than a simple cafe when it opened in Beverly Hills, Calif., in 1978 as a place to feature the cheesecakes that Overton's parents made in their nearby bakery. "I just set out to help my parents," he says. Overton had no training in food and no "culinary influence" other than hours spent hanging out in San Francisco cafes. So he stuffed the sandwiches with sprouts, served espresso drinks nine years before Starbucks did and kept himself open to new ideas. In California in the 1980s, they were everywhere. Early on, he added burritos and a stir-fry to the menu. He loved casual Asian-inspired restaurants like Spago and soon started spending some time each day developing new recipes with his best line cook.

That effort has evolved into the Cheesecake Factory's epic epicurean tasting trips. Twice a year, Overton and his team of R&D chefs visit the best restaurants in New York City, London, Singapore and other cities. A recent New York itinerary included Mario Batali's Del Posto, Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto's Morimoto and Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Spice Market. A weeklong trip might include three lunches and dinners every day, during which they often taste every item on the menu--plus snacks.

A man of Falstaffian proportions and equally wide-ranging tastes, Overton wants his food to be both popular and populist. "The stuffiness of waiters? That's got to go," he says. Not everyone can afford the $30 miso-glazed black cod made famous by Nobu, but the Cheesecake Factory's best-selling miso salmon is only $18 and three times the size. "Why should that memorable food experience be limited?" asks Bob Okura, the Cheesecake Factory's corporate executive chef. Critics call the portions a gimmick; health policy experts call them a dangerous contribution to obesity; the Cheesecake Factory sees value, encouraging customers to make a second meal of leftovers. Overton loves the attention that celebrity chefs have brought to dining out, but there is no room for ego in his restaurants. The person in charge of the food at a Cheesecake Factory is called a kitchen manager, not a chef. The emphasis is on consistency, not creativity.

Instead, creativity is channeled into the company's $1 million R&D kitchen. There, Okura and his staff of 10 chefs, line cooks and pastry chefs have free rein to experiment. Brandon Cook, one of three R&D chefs and the only one who has cooked in a Cheesecake Factory, is riffing on the lobster roll--subbing crab and shrimp for lobster and thick white bread for the traditional top-split hot-dog buns in this classic New England sandwich. Before setting out samples--one on grilled bread, another toasted--he has gone through half a dozen iterations, playing with the dressing and the proportions of bread, seafood, tomato and lettuce. Overton loves the grilled bread, but Cook wants to wait until he can try it with a top-split hot-dog bun before moving it forward in the menu competition. "You can only get those on the East Coast," he says. "I know it will probably taste better."

Mohan Ismail, a Singaporean chef most recently at New York's Spice Market, sends out braised beef short ribs in a green curry with tiny, delicate Thai eggplant, slivers of bamboo shoots and baby bok choy. Ismail has toned down the fish sauce, and instead of the rougher texture of ground fresh coconut, his curry gets a silky smoothness from coconut milk and chicken stock and an almost grass green color from cilantro puree. Overton raves but doesn't have a place for it yet.

None of the chefs' artistry will ever make it to a restaurant unless it gets through Joaquin Marchan, a star Cheesecake Factory line cook who now puts new recipes through their road tests. It's here that the free-form lasagna started to fall apart. Okura and his chefs had perfected two versions of the dish, layers of pasta, cheese and sauce: one with roasted tomato sauce adorned with basil oil, the other an all-beef Bolognese with truffle oil.

Marchan, working from detailed instructions, ladles chicken stock and heaps of butter into a hot saute pan and waits as the tomato sauce heats under a cheese melter, with Okura and Matz hovering like anxious trainers at the edge of a boxing ring. "You don't have to go so fast," Okura says, giving him a calming pat on the shoulders. He and Matz then shift gears. Instead of having him blanch the pasta, they want Marchan to finish cooking it in the saute pan and then assemble the layers. His lasagna looks messier than the chef's version. Okura checks the clock. "Eight minutes," he says. "Eight minutes is a long time on a busy night." Even worse, "it's a little mushy," Overton says. No one is sure why--the last-minute pasta change?--but that may have ended its chances.

When Overton or one of the R&D chefs has a new idea in mind, Okura usually begins in his cookbook library, consulting cooking bibles such as Escoffier and Larousse Gastronomique and masters ranging from Julia Child and James Beard to Thomas Keller and Wolfgang Puck. "If David suggests something from Thailand or Argentina or Costa Rica," Okura says, he will talk to chefs with that expertise. "We will get to the core of any cuisine, any culture." Okura and his chefs may experiment with abandon, but they have a deep appreciation for the rules they're breaking.

When the restaurant introduced the Vietnamese summer roll--translucent sheets of rice paper filled with julienned vegetables and shrimp--Okura had to make several compromises. Instead of making them to order, Cheesecake prep cooks make them in advance every day, so he found shrimp that hold up in cold storage. A true summer roll would have mint, but that strong flavor turns off some people. "We had to make a hard decision as to whether or not we were going to stay that close to the traditional concept," he says. Okura left out the mint, and the shrimp aren't as plump as Gulf shrimp, but the crisp vegetables somehow still conjure up a summer roll's cool, fresh essence.

Summer rolls without mint; puttanesca without anchovies. Those are the compromises that have made the Cheesecake Factory such an inviting target. One critic derided the "something for everyone" aesthetic as "a repository for all other corporate-restaurant concepts." Overton can live with that. "We just try to be really good, with strong flavors," he says. "Authenticity isn't anything that we really care about." He's ready for the purists who will complain that the cured meat in a new pasta amatriciana really ought to be guanciale, made from pork jowls, rather than pancetta, pork belly. "You know what? Most of our people do not care," Overton says.

He isn't on a mission to educate; he would rather be the hitmaker. Take dulce de leche, the sweetened milk cooked down to a caramel that is a staple of Latin American desserts. Overton had considered it for a cheesecake flavor for years, but he waited for a cue--Haeagen Dazs' introducing dulce de leche ice cream--before trying the bittersweet, burned-sugar taste on his customers in 2002. It now ranks as the chain's fifth most popular of 40 cheesecakes.

Strong sales are the only measure of success that really matter for any of the new dishes that will soon appear on the menu. The lasagna got the ax, but the Bolognese sauce with white truffle oil will get a shot as a pasta entree, along with a spinach, poached-chicken and bacon salad, a crab hash made with potatoes and onions and the pasta with four roasted tomato sauces--including puttanesca without anchovies. If they don't sell, they're gone, no matter how much Overton or any critic loves or loathes them.

In this way, the Cheesecake Factory is the closest thing in the restaurant business to democracy in action. Overton reminisces about dishes he loved that never found a constituency: the torpedo dog, a kosher hot dog with red onions and sweet mustard baked into a pizza-dough crust; a pasta made with melted onions, cream and cognac. White-chocolate macadamia nut had been a top-10 cheesecake flavor for years, but it has fallen to the bottom five and is on the way out. Lamb and veal might appeal to critics, but "we just can't sell it," Overton says. Special interests, like vegetarians, get a few concessions. And as in any democracy, sometimes the voters surprise you. Thai lettuce wraps--a pileup of satay chicken, coconut curry noodles, sprouts and vegetables--are among the top-three appetizers in every city the Cheesecake Factory serves.

Overton decided years ago that he would never limit his menu to one style of cooking. "There's nothing America wants to eat that we won't put on there," he says. By keeping the door open to Asia, Latin America and Africa, he created a menu as inclusive as America itself. Today Americans' increasingly sophisticated tastes are posing a new challenge. "You can't just slip things by anymore," Okura says. They can watch the secrets of four-star chefs on TV, and they may know firsthand what "authentic" tastes like. Forget critics or consultants. The only people who can push the Cheesecake Factory to turn up the spice, turn down the butter or give the anchovies another look are the people who eat there. The mirror, as it turns out, works both ways.