The Cheesecake Factory Doesn’t Need Your Approval

There’s a reason that low-stakes arguments like whether Airbnb hosts force guests to do too many chores or exactly what plastic surgery Jennifer Lawrence has gotten done go viral. In times of societal upheaval when everything feels doomed, it’s refreshing to worry about things that don’t really matter.

You know, like The Cheesecake Factory.

The latest debate taking over social media is about which chain restaurants are trash and which are worth forking over some of your hard-earned money to before the robots take over and kill us all. It’s a fun little conversation to have as most of us can’t afford to go out to eat anyway. 

For plenty of middle-class Americans, Olive Garden feels like a Thursday night standby, Applebee’s has the half-price apps after 9 p.m., and Texas Roadhouse is great for steak and throwing peanut shells on the floor. The Cheesecake Factory is where you go for a fancy night out — to celebrate a birthday, a graduation, a promotion. This was all understood and accepted until Barack Obama came along and sneered at the idea.

The restaurant chain found itself at the center of a political and cultural debate when the former president took a swipe at President Donald Trump’s White House renovations, quipping that the gold-themed decor made the building look like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”

It was a joke about Trump’s taste in interior design, but listeners also took it as a thinly veiled statement about how most of the country lives.

The Cheesecake Factory is aggressively gaudy and overdecorated. It’s true that everything there is oversized, from the booth sizes to the sheer number of items on the book-length menu. But people love it, and they’re willing to defend it. That’s why Obama’s comment touched a nerve, reigniting a familiar argument about the things regular Americans enjoy that supposedly sophisticated people turn their noses up at. 

That was where the debate got interesting. Somewhere along the way, enjoying a perfectly ordinary restaurant became something people felt compelled to defend. 

The Cheesecake Factory isn’t a Michelin-starred establishment, but that doesn’t actually matter. The idea that a restaurant has to be exclusive, expensive, or approved by Barack Obama and his millionaire cohorts to be worth enjoying is clearly snobbish. That attitude is becoming increasingly hard to bear.

Not everyone has to like The Cheesecake Factory, and in the real world not everyone does. There are still middle-class people who frequent small, independent restaurants and prefer to avoid chain establishments for whatever reason. That doesn’t make The Cheesecake Factory terrible; it’s really a matter of preference. 

But there are also concrete examples that prove The Cheesecake Factory doesn’t have to worry about what the culinary elitists think. It all comes down to the numbers, right? And here’s the thing: The business is doing rather well.

According to its October 27 earnings announcement, The Cheesecake Factory Incorporated reported third-quarter fiscal 2026 revenue of approximately $1.03 billion, up from $907.2 million during the same period a year earlier. Comparable restaurant sales at its namesake locations increased 15.2% year over year.

Those numbers cover a company that also operates other restaurant brands, so it would be inaccurate to attribute all this growth to Cheesecake Factory locations alone. Still, the company’s results are hard to argue with. While plenty of upscale fine-dining establishments are closing forever, even after boosts from big-name chefs and fawning food critics, The Cheesecake Factory remains. Glittering. Gaudy. Delicious. 

Perhaps consumers appreciate having a lot of choices on a single menu, and maybe they’re fans of generous portions. It’s surely helpful that they don’t need to finagle a reservation months in advance and then spend hundreds of dollars on pretentious dishes they don’t fully understand. Not every palate is refined, and that’s normal. It’s a possibility worth considering before assuming that millions of customers have somehow failed to understand what a great meal should taste like. 

In its defense, The Cheesecake Factory is not McDonald’s, and it’s not even Chili’s when it comes to food prep. The company says chefs prepare its more than 250 menu items fresh from scratch in its restaurants. Its website describes busy preparation kitchens where employees work with fresh ingredients and make dishes to order.

That is an important distinction in a restaurant industry where the degree of preparation varies widely from one operation to another, with many resorting to premade, reheated options that all tend to taste the same. 

Buying ingredients through a distributor such as Sysco does not necessarily mean the food arrives fully prepared and restaurants merely reheat it. The Cheesecake Factory likely uses food distributors for ingredients rather than sourcing from, say, local farms. But because the kitchen cooks menu items from scratch, the food is several steps ahead of restaurants that rely solely on premade meals. 

With a menu the size of The Cheesecake Factory’s, this is no small thing. The company itself acknowledges that maintaining such an extensive selection while preparing food from scratch is unusual enough to have drawn criticism from people in the restaurant industry. The haters say it causes more food waste, longer ticket times, and an unnecessarily big inventory bill. But it’s proof that the restaurant does care about quality. And it’s working.

Perhaps the most revealing thing about the Cheesecake Factory debate is how much cultural significance people are willing to assign to a place where someone might order a burger, split an appetizer, and take home a slice of cheesecake. It’s really not that deep. In the eternal words of Sheryl Crow, if it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad.

Restaurants occupy an interesting place in our social lives. They’re about food, certainly, but they’re also about money and status. What we eat and where we eat it often becomes a reflection of who we are socially, and what we deserve. This doesn’t mean The Cheesecake Factory is the greatest restaurant in America, though some people may indeed think it is. But no matter what, it’s not a measure of someone’s value as a person. 

You can enjoy a chef’s tasting menu on Friday and celebrate your birthday somewhere with a 20-page menu the next week. Hit the drive-thru and don’t feel bad about it. Order the Godiva cheesecake.  

The world is on fire, the robots are coming for our jobs, and we’re all paying too much for groceries. The good news is that we still don’t have to care about what Barack Obama thinks.

Some debates are worth having. This one should end with a reservation for six.

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This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.