The Agenda

Note: This letter from a concerned Providentian appeared in The Agenda #18.

Dear “The Cheesecake Factory,”

Approximately one year ago I went to your restaurant to enjoy a nice meal with my girlfriend. She had been given a gift certificate and was excited to take me out for a change. I was intrigued by many of the pastas you had on your menu, but because of dietary restrictions, I was forced to ask a specific question. This question, it turns out, has only one answer at “the Cheesecake Factory”: Yes, I’m afraid so.

It was pretty clear after sending our server to the kitchen two or three times that pretty much every pasta dish I was interested in was going to contain chicken stock. “That’s not really a big deal, I’m flexible. Give me a second to check out your salads,” I said. My server probably knew the drill from here on. That having been said, she watched me paw dumbstruck at the salad menu, the way a trained monkey molests a television screen when a symbol that it associates with a reward appears on its screen. “Does every salad have chicken in it?” Followed by the inevitable, “Yes, I’m afraid so. But we can make one without it.”

I appreciate that the modern American diner is a hulking mammoth beast of an eater, one whose bloodlust, Budweiser-numbed palate and sheer lack of respect for food quality leads them to believe that Chili’s is good food. I mean, freaking CHILI’S. So you guys have to deal with that sort of ignorance, and you need to do it on a national level, which means that a Bostonian has to like the same thing a San Franciscan does. This is a staggering task considering what people accept as pizza these days. Have you ever had pizza in California? It’s terrible! Yet there’s a California Pizza Kitchen? My guess is it's successful. You have to deal with people who think that putting “grille” at the end of a restaurant makes it fancy. So you have a monumental, but still important task.

And it is this task that you are clearly not up to. A salad doesn’t have chicken in it. As a novelty, salads can have chicken added to them— usually at some extra charge—but it is an unnatural addition. Sort of like a Snickers bar in a cheesecake (we’ll get to this later). What I have trouble dealing with is that I have to pay for that chicken despite the fact that I am not eating it. I’m assuming that the way things are going, eventually a salad is going to be a plate of fried chicken that I have to spend $2.99 to get a side of lettuce and cucumbers with. You have a responsibility to your customers to halt this horrible sleight of hand that corporate food is pulling on the American public.

I get the impression that “the Cheesecake Factory” has some sort of anti-chicken agenda. Perhaps it’s all national restaurant chains? Maybe, tucked inside “Ruby Tuesday’s” corporate headquarters is a locked room with thick, concrete walls where an angry, jaundice-skinned man scratches at a chalkboard figuring out new ways to justify chickens being killed. “Have we figured out how to make paper from them yet?” he asks madly, to the cold, joyless empty room. “Get right to work on that! I’m two days away from figuring out how to pave roads with chicken feathers.” It seems possible, considering these are dishes that, traditionally speaking, have always been vegetarian. Why alter them? You can hide behind consumer demand, but I don’t think so. I think it’s a serious lack of real creativity.

What I mean by a lack of creativity is this: instead of coming up with a really cool cheesecake, you go to the candy isle and say, “Joe Q. Public likes Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups—lets throw some on a cheesecake and we’ve got one more to add to the list. Once we start selling a ton of that, we can reduce the general quality of the ingredients because anyone who doesn’t think cheesecake is rich enough can’t tell the difference between ‘tolerable’ and ‘good’.” You guys are “the Cheesecake Factory”! Come on, you can do better than that. Why not add chicken to one? Oh, wait—I never even asked. You don’t put chicken in the cheesecake, do you? Please don’t let the answer be, “Yes, I’m afraid so.” That would be gross.

I think restaurants like yours have an opportunity to actually be—and I do mean this—good. There is no good reason you can’t make money and sell better food: more authentic, less “American” in the McDonald’s sense, and more “American” in the revolutionary, fiercely independent, melting pot sense.

So, in closing: DO BETTER. Take chicken out of one dinner salad. You could even baby-step your way into a vegan selections page. That would be socially responsible, delicious, and marketable. Not only that, but it would make you a whole lot less like Chili’s.

Chili’s fucking sucks,

Sincerely,

Jef Choice