Factory

One restaurant that I end up eating at quite often although I am not really that fond of it is Cheesecake Factory. Remember a few years ago when Cheesecake Factory was sort of the craze? The official restaurant of High Schoolers birthday dinners, the official place parents took their kids when they came to visit them at college, the official place you could take a first date and the girl wouldn't be too upset that you took her to a chain and didn't think of something more creative.

Cheesecake Factory's always anchor shopping plazas built in middle to upper class suburbia.

Well to such a restaurant I ventured the other night and once again upon eating I wasn't dissatisfied but I wasn't in love with what I had either. And the reason I have never been in love with Cheesecake Factory even when it was the craze was because they just try and do too much. I can read a John Grisham novel quicker than I can read their menu and when a place has that much to choose from you always wonder how fresh all that variety can really be. I don't think the word "Factory" helps either - doesn't really scream "freshness."

The restaurants that I love are the ones that do one or two things and do it very well.

Cheesecake does a lot of things good but really doesn't do anything great.

And the other night as I was just cracking the Table of Contents for their menu I realized that I - along with a lot of my fellow stressed out friends - have become living Cheesecake Factory's. We're running around doing a million things at once just to get by and in hopes of finding that one all consuming passion and in the midst of it all I wonder if I am doing anything great.

A lot of the time we run around and do a million things at once out of necessity and I would like to think I'm still in that necessity territory of life but at the end of the day I hope it all slows down. I hope I reach my goals. I hope at the end of the day I am doing one thing greatly and not doing too many things at once and in the end not really being effective at all.