Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevenwoo | Hacker News Reader

They make almost everything (baked desserts and cheesecake excepted) in house. Most casual dining places use a lot of Sysco pre-made stuff. This doesn't make it better but that's unusual for a chain, along with the high number of menu items.

View on HN

You're saying the cheesecake factory makes everything except the actual cheese cakes?

The article mentions they have separate bakeries (uncertain whether Cheesecake Factory owned or not), the in house kitchen/pantry/freezer is optimized around food prep/cooking everything else on menu.

They should maybe rebrand to The Cheesecake Outlet.

I think "Factory" works, since the cheesecakes are the menu item that is made in an actual factory instead of a kitchen.

That would make sense if the sign was on the factory that made them and not the restaurant they are delivered to

Perhaps "Cheesecake Factory Outlet" would be more to your liking?

They have a factory in Calabasas, California that makes all of their cheese cakes.

I've read that several times...

And yet, I drive by there every morning on my way to work, and twice a week there's a Sysco truck backing in to their parking lot. What exactly are they delivering, if not pre-made.

If I wanted to spend $150 eating out, I'd want something slightly less nasty than their crap. It tastes like microwaved Stouffers.

Rather than them being supergenius restauranteurs, it really does look like they just managed to survive the last decade when so many other chain restaurants went tits up since 2008. That coupled with covid cabin fever that seems like it never went away, makes for the sort of busy some mistake for grand success.

Sysco delivers food, no more, no less. They deliver what is ordered. If you ordered canned breakfast gravy, that's what arrives. If you order fresh produce, you get what you asked for. Now I'm not saying there are not better sources for top quality fresh ingredients out there. But it's also not accurate to equate Sysco with strictly premade garbage.

Sysco can also act as a logistics service for your own supplies if you are big enough. I used to work for a large restaurant chain (large enough that we would negotiate shrimp prices by the ton). We would have our beef suppliers deliver to Sysco cold storage, and then individual locations would order from there. We owned the beef the whole time, and just paid for storage and delivery.

It would surprise me if CCF isn’t doing this with some of their ingredients.

CCF is probably using their logistics to ship their cheesecakes from their factory in California nationwide, at the very least. That's something that has to get distributed nationwide and there are no easy replacements.

I worked on the system sysco uses for their order guide management, and we had a bug that let anyone order cheesecake factory cheesecakes for a brief moment and that was a red alert issue for us

sysco also delivers ingredients, they're not the best quality, but I was at a place where everything was from scratch and most of the produce and ingredients came from sysco.

Sysco is reliable, you order ten pounds of tomatoes and you will get your ten pounds of tomatoes day in and day out.

Sure you could send your chef to the farmer’s market to pick tomatoes but that is more costly and sometimes he’d return empty handed.

Yeah, and for produce honestly they were just fine, on par with what you'd get at the local HEB. I wasn't impressed by the meat quality but our manager might have been getting the cheaper stuff from them.

Much of what they cook is pasta. Are the ingredients "dried pasta"? Are they cooking the sauces themselves, after stewing tomatoes for 6 hours? Or do those come out of a can?

I'm guessing that for the pasta, they're boiling water. The rest of their menu looks like cheeseburgers and sandwiches. So maybe they're frying up a frozen patty once in awhile. Are they baking the bread and buns for these sandwiches themselves?

They also have alot of weird appetizers. Are they wrapping those spring rolls themselves, or do those come frozen out of a box and ready to deep fry? Fried cheese sticks, asparagus, and zucchini... are you telling me those are hand-breaded, or do they come frozen out of a box?

(Before you answer, consider carefully if someone who has never wrapped a spring roll before can get it right on even the 10th try after watching a 40 second tutorial video on the ipad they have bolted up above the prep table.)

There are half a dozen soups. Are those not coming out of a can?

Crusted/breaded chicken... that's not coming out of the box frozen?

https://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/menu

Oh, looks like you can get onion rings. Are those not coming frozen out of the box to be deep-fried? French fries?

When I get the crispy pineapple chicken and shrimp, are you telling me that they cut up a pineapple that morning for when that's ordered, or do they cut up the pineapple when I order it? Or, is it frozen in a plastic bag, like those god-awful stir-fries you get in the frozen section at the grocery store?

Did they slice the corn off the cob that morning themselves, or does that come out of a plastic bag, all flash-frozen?

Do they have a rice steamer in the back, or is that in one of those plastic per-serving bags that are microwaved?

The only stuff on this menu that are both "made themselves" and "not fast food" are the steaks (and good luck getting a good one there).

This place shares its menu (literally) with Fazolis. There are CCF-branded items on Fazolis menu the last time I went there. This is TGI Friday's level bullshit. They aren't some big-data driven Nostradamuses (Nostradami?), the link's just a gussed-up press release.

I was able to roll spring rolls pretty well in around 10 minutes of practice, although the prep area required might be difficult for a chain restaurant.

I don't really eat at the cheesecake factory so I can't speak to that.

Any one of those are things they might do, quickly and easily and with little practice. All of them, or even half?

They're not doing them. Any of them. If someone made such extraordinary claims, reasonable people would require extraordinary evidence.

I've provided quite a bit of corroboration to the idea that they're not doing any of it. Sure, my case is circumstantial, but I think that's permissible outside of a criminal courtroom, where the accusation is "non-crime, doing it like everyone else" without so much as the hint of slander.

You're all nuts. Nothing said on HN outside of a very narrow focus of technology should ever be taken for granted.

I think it's pretty likely most of the things you mention are frozen, now that I'm skimming your comment. It's really long.

Have you worked in a commercial kitchen? I thought it was pretty tough but quite rewarding to make big portions of tasty food.

$150 for eating at a casual restaurant? Is that typical in America these days? I'm guessing that's for 2 people, but still that's ridiculous.

It is ridiculous. Excluding drinks, you can eat for $25 per person at a casual restaurant even on the US west coast. But pre Covid, I would say that may have been $15 to $20.

If you are getting an appetizer, dinner, and dessert, then add another $20 to $30, but very, very few people should be eating that many calories and sugar/sat fats.

Not for casual, though I guess it depends on where you live.

Assuming you don't order alcohol, and avoid specialty foods (lobster in the Midwest, proper steak pretty much anywhere) it shouldn't be hard to get a meal for two under $50 in most casual places. If I'm willing to spend more than that, we're going straight to fine dining

You'd guess wrong. That is probably for a family of 4 including desert and drinks. Not cheap, but not horrible either.

$37.50/person sounds pretty ridiculously expensive to me for casual dining.

right but it's still not crazy like $150 for 1 person. I spend around $200 a month for one person, so it's not like I'm not cheap :) . I almost never eat out except special occasions like a birthday or the holidays.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com