My favorite cheesecake factory experience:
Family decides to go there for actual food. Sister orders their "spicy" thai dish. It's not spicy. So she asks if they can make it spiceir. It comes back with more sauce on it. It's still not spicy. She asks if they can just toss some cayenne in it. The waiter tells her, "we don't actually have the ingredients to the dish. We just have more packages of its sauce."
This kind of confirms my suspicion about Cheesecake Factory kitchen.
Their menu is ridiculously long, but a lot of the items seem derivative of each other, so I e always fig Ted that there was some sort of Yum-esque assembly line in the back where all the items on the menu are made off of the same 20 core ingredients. Like chicken with dumplings is one scoop from the grilled chicken vat, one from the dumpling vat, and one scoop of the chicken gravy. Want a pot pie? Hold the dumplings, add a scoop from the succotash vat and throw a crust on top, etc.
I do agree their food is overpriced. It’s really not that good for the price, and their seating situation is terrible at the one by me. The one time I went there I almost asked if the woman next to me to sit in my lap we were seated so closely together.