The Cheesecake Factory

A California chain takes Newton by storm

by Robert Nadeau

DINING OUT

The Cheesecake Factory 300 Boylston Street (Atrium Mall), Chestnut Hill (617) 964-3001 Open Mon-Thurs, 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m.; Fri and Sat, 11:30 a.m.-12:30 a.m.; and Sunday, 10 a.m.-10 p.m. AE, DC, Disc, MC, Visa Full bar No smoking Street-level access via Atrium garage (free)

When you travel around the country, you realize again how resistant Boston has been to restaurant chains from elsewhere. Foodwise, California barely exists for us. But the success of the Cheesecake Factory -- a 34-unit chain that began as a Beverly Hills bakery -- raises some questions about whether we Bostonians are changing our parochial ways. It's one thing to have a Disney Store in Quincy Market, a place some Bostonians never visit. It's quite another to have the Cheesecake Factory lining 'em up in two of our leading suburban malls. Two perfectly good local-style Italian restaurants have gone south in the Atrium alone, and here is this rather nondescript family-oriented chain doing just fine.

Certainly, the Cheesecake Factory is well designed for malls. Put your name on the list for a table (no reservations), and they hand you a beeper. The menu has fashion advertising in it, as well as 21 pages' worth of food and drink. It's hard to think of an impulse the menu can't handle. It's got shepherd's pie and chicken piccata and pad Thai and Cajun jambalaya pasta and Caribbean steak and grilled portobello mushroom on a bun and hamburgers and popcorn shrimp and lox-onions-and-eggs and caesar salad and a California guacamole-and-brie melt.

There is no disguising the Beverly Hills-ness of it. They play country rock and very light R&B, and the décor is that costume-drama Egypto-deco I thought they locked up after Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra. But no, they just added potted plants. Appetizers are pricey but huge; entrées are mid-range and huge; and there are more flavors of cheesecake than Howard Johnson had ice creams -- 34 to 28, you can look it up.

The challenge for a kitchen doing so many things is to do any of them well. The challenge for a reviewer is to find what it does well. The menu at the Cheesecake Factory is not much help, but fortunately I brought my daughter Stephanie, well versed in mall semiotics, and her equally savvy friend Amber. Young teens tend to know a lot about certain dishes, while insisting that they haven't eaten, say, asparagus in two or three years.

The first thing you'll be offered at the Cheesecake Factory is an overpriced drink. On the alcoholic side, that means dating-bar sweet potions, a very decent list of American wines, and a surprisingly weak list of a dozen beers -- no microbrews. On the nonalcoholic side, raspberry lemonade ($3.25) is rather good. Hot tea ($2) displays the usual service error: hot water in a metal pot, with a tea bag on the side. By the time it gets to the table, the water isn't hot enough to brew the tea bag. The breadbasket includes a cakey dark bread and a soft sourdough white.

On both visits, the girls went for Cal-Mex appetizers. I thought they hit pretty well with the quesadilla appetizer, although Stephanie insisted on picking the mild chili pepper out of each wedge of tortilla-cheese sandwich. The sides of guacamole and sour cream were good, and the mound of tomato salsa had some fresh cilantro in it. The nachos ($6.95) were huge, with black beans added to the standard mess of tortilla chips, cheese, and jalapeño slices, but there's better Tex-Mex food even in Boston.

Vietnamese shrimp summer rolls ($7.95) were pretty effective, with a lively and somewhat Vietnamese dipping sauce. With three huge rolls, this may be as much appetizer as some parties need. The summer rolls are the uncooked ones wrapped in softened rice paper, which here sometimes fall apart because of overstuffing. In Vietnamese-American homes, you roll your own.

The main dishes the girls liked were pasta with four cheeses ($11.95) and orange chicken ($12.95). The former, made with penne and fresh basil, is a nice step up for mac-and-cheese vegetarians. The latter is a not-quite version of General Gau's chicken: fried nuggets that might have been long in the freezer, in a sweet-sour sauce that might have been too sharp, served with a bed of rice and surrounding vegetables that include a lot of fresh snow peas.

What's a grown-up to eat? Well, probably a salad or grilled salmon, or a steak, depending on how you believe. I can't say much for the "classic burger" ($8.95), other than that it comes with a great slice of grilled red onion. The waiter asked how I wanted it, a refreshing offer in the age of E. coli, but it arrived dead well-done anyway. It was also too lean and dried out, and came with rather weak French fries.

Given the dessert options facing you, it might be just as well to appetize and then skip the main course. I suspect a lot of those entrées are headed home for the microwave anyway. It is impossible to review all the available flavors of cheesecake, although I've heard management trainees do just that, one per day. The best we had in two visits was Kahlúa almond fudge ($5.95), the strong flavors masking a slight lack of richness. On the other hand, coffee Heath bar crunch ($5.95) was kind of a dud for our May-September party. Actual tiramisu ($5.95) was overflavored at the center, but mounted in so much whipped cream that it was hard to get at. A chocolate "black-out cake" ($5.95) would barely make a real chocolate addict blink. It's very large, however, with a lot of chocolate frosting and nuts.

Service at the Atrium Cheesecake Factory is fair. I had to get up for ketchup and a fork, but water was refilled. Our table opened up somewhat later than the 20- to 40-minute wait we were quoted. Because youth culture and suburban culture have been compressed into mall culture, the general atmosphere is that of a dating bar, even though most parties are not on dates. Or do people do shopping dates now?

Robert Nadeau can be reached at robtnadeau@aol.com.

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