The Cheesecake Factory’s New Small Plate Menu (07/09)
I’m a Cheesecake Factory fan, but started well after the opening of the first store in Beverly Hills in 1983. I learned that there’s no place like the Cheesecake Factory to celebrate in a big and outlandish way one Mother’s Day in the Marina. It it turned out we were four of 500 customers. Still server and busboy treated us like the most important guests in the place. What other restaurant staff makes you feel that it’s “a terrific idea” to share a dish or make a substitution on a well thought-out 79-item menu?
When my elbow was infected recently, all I wanted was a burger and ice cream when I could go out. Cheesecake didn’t let me down with a chophouse burger, the best in town, at the same price as fast-food counter joints. The gargantuan ice cream sundae made my infected elbow feel better, and tasted so much better than anti-biotics.
Recently, just as entrees and salads, already big enough for two but at times impractical as leftovers, grew in size and price, this season Cheesecake Factory rolled out a line of practically priced small plates. The new menu includes 16 dishes priced from $3.95 to $6.50 each.
By comparison to its own huge menu, the new Cheesecake Factory Small Plates & Snacks menu is small. But compared to any other appetizer menu, of course it is big, just as everything is at the restaurant.
“Their new Small Plates& Snacks” are designed as a “pre-appetizer” or to be combined with other dishes to make a full meal. Actually three Small Plates or a Small Plate and an entrée make up a more than satisfying main meal.
Though keeping in line as part of a growing trend in the restaurant industry, this menu retains the eatery’s bigger-than-life image. Explained Mark Mears, senior vice president and chief marketing officer. “We introduced the menu to make The Cheesecake Factory even more accessible to Americans looking for reasons to get out and celebrate.” Laughed Mears, “Don’t let the name fool you. At The Cheesecake Factory we don’t do anything small.”
And leave it to the Cheesecake Factory to label a stack of fat onion rings ($3.95) secured to the plate by a toothpick in a kind of ring-toss game “pole” as a “snack.”
Trendy classic Happy Hour fare is covered in most of the choices with few surprises. These range from the Fried zucchini ($3.95), and an assortment of Crispy Fried Cheese ($.4.95) to Wild Mushroom ($4.95) or Shrimp Scampi Crostini ($6.50).
In the Ahi Tartare ($6.50) presentation, fresh fish mixed with fresh avocado is shaped into a cylinder that can be scooped out with the fried wonton strips placed around it like flower petals.
More of a surprise is the refreshing yet rich Beets with Goat Cheese ($4.95) on its rectangular “small plate.” In past high end restaurant attempts at this dish done as a terrine, beet juice seeped into the goat cheese and made it unappealing, if tasty. Not here. This “Beets with Goat Cheese’’ salad sums up all the essence of summer and deserves “signature” designation. Velvety fresh beets and snappy apples, all diced, are mixed into a fluffy field of fresh arugula, then dotted with pecans. Filled with different tastes and textures, this is a Cheesecake offering that is also healthy, healthy, healthy.
Rectangular Plates seemed to hold the winners on this new menu, and the Fresh Baked Pizzettes ($4.95) were clear favorites at every table around us. Chewy, thin-crust rectangles of pizza, as they serve it up on streets
The Wild Mushroom Pizzette is topped with garlic, shallots and fresh herbs, and Fontina, Parmesan, Rromano Cheeses, along with garlic crumbs and herbs are on the Sausage and Ricotta
Another mouth-watering surprise arrived in the contrasting textures of the Crispy Artichoke Hearts ($3.95) served with Lemon-Garlic Aioli. The little spheres are lined up on a triangular place like billiard balls before the first hit. Bite into one of these crispy battered and flash-fried little balls and you taste as a contrast, the most silky artichoke, all buttery and melting. We later learned that the secret to the artichokes, which taste more like delicate artichoke hearts, is that they are marinated first.
Sweet Corn Fritters ($3.95) tempt just with the name yet. Here crunchy batter pieces form on each piece like buds on a plant of these mouth-watering bites. Looking ethereally airy, they taste ethereally airy with little pops of fresh corn in each one. You know you are eating something that is fried, and you know it is batter and you know it is corn, but the taste is still heavenly, after one or three or five.
The Roasted Stuffed Dates ($5.95), filled with Parmesan cheese and wrapped with smoked bacon sound better than they taste. The idea of replacing blue cheese with Parmesan for novelty is admirable, as is smoking the bacon, but maybe blue cheese wouldn’t have been as heavy with the same texture as the date, and pancetta wouldn’t be as oily.
And best of all, every one of the small bites make delicious leftovers at home, even at room temperature, so there’s always room for a “little” dessert.