The Cheesecake Factory has plenty of delicious options, but it's not exactly the best place
to eat out at if you're on a diet. While not every item on the menu is equally horrifying,
there are certain ones you should absolutely avoid if you want to stay healthy.
There's a reason why The Cheesecake Factory's huge menu is all over the map. When it opened in 1972,
founder and CEO David Overton needed a place to sell his mom's cheesecakes.
"My mother's cheesecakes were the best because they had this magical flavor,
and people just responded to it like crazy."
Overton wasn't a chef, and he had no previous restaurant experience.
He needed a menu that he could cook himself, so he initially focused on classic American fare:
burgers and fries, sandwiches, and salads. But other restaurants with specialty cuisine were
stiff competition, and Overton didn't want to lose business to them. So the
company expanded the menu haphazardly, adding Mexican dishes, Italian dishes,
and hybrids of both. Anything that could be conceivably ordered, Overton added to the menu.
This throw-it-to-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks philosophy gave birth to the Louisiana Chicken
Pasta. This Frankenstein-esque creation won the 2015 Xtreme Eating Award as one of the top five
worst restaurant-chain meals. It consists of four breaded and fried slices of chicken breast placed
on bowtie pasta with a spicy New Orleans sauce. One portion contains 2,370 calories,
meaning that you could go over your daily quota without even finishing it.
Although there are a few vegetarian options available, The Cheesecake Factory isn't the place
for someone who doesn't eat meat, unless you're willing to make a meal out of mainly side dishes.
There are certain items that should not under any circumstances be ordered by veggie lovers,
or by anyone frankly. One such item is the over-the-top dish called Pasta
Napoletana , which sounds like something Napoleon himself threw together while invading Naples.
Neapolitan sauce is basically a marinara , which is a dish any vegetarian or vegan can
freely adore. But there's a lot more to the Pasta Napoletana than just Neapolitan sauce.
This dish scored another win for The Cheesecake Factory in the 2017 Xtreme Eating Awards as the
"Worst Adapted Pasta." This vegetarian's nightmare is a Matterhorn of Italian sausage, pepperoni,
meatballs, and bacon piled on top of three cups of spaghetti that's been drenched in heavy cream and
butter. The Cheesecake Factory has been under fire for years about its absurd portion sizes,
and this is a particularly notorious offender, as it packs 2,480 calories with 221 grams of fat.
It may be delicious, but this monstrosity will undoubtedly expand your girth.
Breakfast is generally considered essential for keeping healthy,
but not all breakfasts are created equal. If you're at The Cheesecake Factory in the
morning hours, you should probably avoid the Cinnamon Roll Pancakes, which nabbed one of
the top spots in the 2019 Xtreme Eating Awards. They contain the equivalent fat,
sugar, and calorie content of 11 Krispy Kreme Glazed Doughnuts. It shouldn't be so easy to
cram 2,040 calories into just three pancakes, but the Cheesecake Factory manages it with aplomb.
Considering that three, six-inch homemade buttermilk pancakes typically total 525 calories,
you have to wonder just how much sugar and butter The Cheesecake Factory is stuffing
into this stack. According to the cinnamon roll pancake recipe on their website,
four six-inch pancakes contain half a cup of vanilla icing. Also, plenty of the cinnamon
swirl ingredients are ladled on top, including brown sugar, cream, and cinnamon. So how long
would it take for you to burn off this cinna-bomb? According to Nutritionix, for a 140-pound person,
it would require more than three hours of running. Better lace up those sneakers!
At first glance, the Chicken and Broccoli Pasta appears to be a somewhat healthy dish.
It's not covered in cheese, and butter and cream aren't pooling in the plate. At 1,360 calories
and 22 grams of saturated fat, it's not exactly a diet dish, though it's not one of the chain's
usual belt-looseners either. But if you keep reading the nutritional information, you'll
discover that with 5,890 milligrams of sodium, this dish is the equivalent of a human salt lick.
"Kids today don't know squat about sodium."
According to the American Heart Association, too much sodium increases blood pressure, which is one
of the major risk factors of heart disease. Salt is tasty, and restaurants add much more of it than
is needed to flavor their meals. According to a 2013 survey by the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, ninety percent of Americans eat more salt than necessary. The American
Heart Association recommends 2,300 milligrams of sodium daily for healthy adults while encouraging
1,500 milligrams for most adults. Which brings us back to the Chicken and Broccoli Pasta,
which has nearly three times the amount of sodium anyone should ever eat in a single day,
so unless you spread it out over the course of several days, you're best off avoiding it.
After having a couple of appetizers at The Cheesecake Factory, you might find yourself
full to the gills, but you don't want to be the only one at the table without an entree.
So you decide to order something light, and then you happily discover
Sheila's Chicken and Avocado Salad. It's big, it's bountiful, it's beautiful! Well,
it's definitely big. It's considered by various outlets, like The Daily Meal and Business Insider,
as one of the unhealthiest items on the menu. It might not seem that way at first,
as it consists of chunks of grilled chicken and avocado on a tower of mixed greens.
Cashews and fried tortilla strips aren't the most diet-friendly items, but they can be picked out.
The real damage is probably from the dressing, a honey-peanut vinaigrette that contributes to the
salad's 56 grams of sugar. The USDA recommends no more than 12 teaspoons per day, so this dish
is definitely pushing it. Chefs are taught in culinary school that adding sugar can balance
a salty dish that doesn't taste right. Sheila's Chicken and Avocado Salad has 2,130 milligrams of
sodium, so the kitchen is doing a real balancing act. If those levels weren't insane enough,
this salad has 129 grams of fat and a total of 1,840 calories. To put this into perspective,
The Cheesecake Factory's Bacon-Bacon Cheeseburger has less fat and is 251 calories lighter.
In 2011, The Cheesecake Factory introduced its new SkinnyLicious menu.
As CEO David Overton stated in a press release,
"We wanted to create a menu that delivers
an exceptional dining experience to our calorie-conscious guests."
The small plates, appetizers, and flatbreads were reformulated to have only 490 calories,
while salads and entrees would have 590 calories or less. Spokeswoman Althea Rowe told ABC News
that The Cheesecake Factory has had lower-calorie items for 30 years, but many patrons don't select
them as they prefer the large portions and rich desserts. But with SkinnyLicious, as she noted,
"We're really making it easier for people to find low-calorie items on our menu."
"I love when I can eat well and not feel guilty about it,
and so you can do that as well by way of their Skinnylicious menu."
In 2018, the FDA issued menu-labeling requirements for chain restaurants with 20 or more locations.
Up until then, The Cheesecake Factory kept nutritional information a secret.
It got around the FDA's mandate by publishing a nutritional guide that's separate from the menu,
which you can peruse upon request. So even though many SkinnyLicious items
are under 600 calories and significantly lower in fat, sodium levels can be still off
the chart. Most hover between 1,200 and 1,500 milligrams, but the Chicken Pot Stickers are
sky-high at 2,690 milligrams. No doubt about it, this five-piece appetizer is
over the FDA's recommended daily sodium intake for a healthy adult.
The top winner of the 2014 Xtreme Eating Award for the worst meal was Cheesecake Factory's Bruleed
French Toast. This sugar-shock-inducing brunch bomb is stuffed with custard and served with a
quarter cup of buttered syrup. When you get it with the optional side of bacon or ham, it has
a grand total of 2,780 calories, a full week's worth of saturated fat at 93 grams, and 2,230
milligrams of sodium. To get a sense of this, imagine eating 14 slices of frozen French toast
slathered with half a cup of cream cheese and sprinkled with 24 teaspoons of sugar. To work all
that off, you would have to swim laps for seven hours. As dietician Paige Einstein told Vox.com,
"When French toast is 'Bruléed [...] it's clear that caloric extremism still rules
the roost at many of America's chain restaurants."
She also made sure to note,
"Two out of three American adults are overweight or obese and one in 10 adults has diabetes,
thanks in part to the Cheesecake Factory [...] and
much of the rest of America’s chain restaurant industry."
Chicken and biscuits is no one's idea of diet food. If you scan recipes for this dish,
you'll find that most have anywhere from 400 to 800 calories per portion, even those with cheese
and creamed gravy. So it'll make you wonder just what The Cheesecake Factory puts into
its take on this classic Southern meal to jam it full with 1,610 calories, 89 grams of fat,
and 3,170 milligrams of sodium. Even Paula Deen, who's hardly known for holding back, wouldn't make
a dish this rich or overstuffed with calories. After The Cheesecake Factory won its sixteenth
Xtreme Eating award in 2014, CEO David Overton was fed up. As he told The Wall Street Journal,
"I was sick of winning that prize."
He ended up changing a few recipes, but he clearly didn't
alter the chicken and biscuits. As dietician Paige Einstein noted,
"Mr. Overton may be tiring of the prize, but he's certainly making sure
that The Cheesecake Factory remains the most calorically extreme chain that we've seen."
If you have a hankering for some rib-sticking comfort food,
you'll be doing you and your family a big favor by passing on The Cheesecake Factory's
chicken and biscuits and cooking up a leaner version yourself at home.
If you poured warm orange marmalade over KFC's Popcorn Nuggets and tossed on a couple of sliced
carrots, you'd get a frighteningly close approximation to The Cheesecake Factory's
Orange Chicken. There are plenty of items on the restaurant's current menu that are deep-fried,
a process that is known for altering the quality of food and
increasing its caloric content. As a result of being deep-fried,
the Orange Chicken has 59 grams of fat, and considering that a slice of the original
cheesecake at The Cheesecake Factory also has 59 grams of fat, that's a pretty outrageous figure.
Then there's the orange sauce that so many patrons love. According to a copycat recipe posted by
the blog "Cheesecake Factory At Home," it has one packed cup of brown sugar, which probably accounts
for this dish's 77 grams of sugar. And that plain slice of cheesecake has 53 grams of sugar. So
ironically, a lighter option is to skip the Orange Chicken and have a plate of cheesecake instead.
On a 2020 post on the subreddit r/gainit , someone revealed that he weighed 133 pounds
and wanted to bulk up by eating The Cheesecake Factory diet. As a Cheesecake Factory employee,
he's entitled to free food, and after consulting the company's nutritional book,
he wrote that he could easily get 1,000 to 2,000 calories in one meal.
If he wants to pack on the pounds fast, he really doesn't need to look much further than
the Breakfast Burrito, the 2018 Xtreme Eating's award-winner for "Worst Way to Start the Day."
This diabolical egg-and-meat-stuffed behemoth has almost a days' worth of calories at 1,950,
a ton of sodium at 3,640 milligrams, and a heap of saturated fat at 59 grams. The Center for
Science in the Public Interest equates chowing down on this burrito to eating seven McDonald's
Sausage McMuffins. The skinny Redditor was advised by commenters that he seek out "clean foods"
instead, because for the most part he wasn't going to find them at The Cheesecake Factory.
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