How The Cheesecake Factory turned a family recipe into a global restaurant chain

In the 1940s, Evelyn Overton found a dessert recipe in a local Detroit newspaper that inspired her to create her “original” cheesecake.

She tweaked the recipe and started making her own cakes.  She eventually opened her own bakery. 

“Everyone loved it,” David Overton said. “It became famous.”

In time, she gave up the business to focus on raising her two children, David and Renee. She moved her baking equipment into her basement kitchen and continued selling cheesecakes to Detroit restaurants.

In the 1970s, David Overton moved to San Francisco to study law. He persuaded his parents, who were then in their 50s, to move to Los Angeles so his mom’s cheesecake business could get another chance in a bigger market.

In 1972, at their son’s behest, Oscar and Evelyn Overton moved to Los Angeles and opened a 700-square-foot commercial bakery in North Hollywood.  

“This was probably the size of one of our walk-ins today,” David Overton said in the video.

His parents opened The Cheesecake Factory bakery in 1972 and began selling Evelyn Overton’s cheesecakes to restaurants throughout Los Angeles.

They worked around the clock, attempting to turn her lifelong dream of owning a successful business into a reality.

Evelyn Overton developed more than a dozen varieties of her cheesecake and other desserts. Her husband was the salesperson. He drove from Santa Barbara to San Diego, selling his wife’s desserts to restaurants across Southern California.

While their business found modest success, the patriarch would get the same feedback: “No one needs more than one flavor of cheesecake.” 

This frustrated David Overton, especially as some restaurant owners began switching to other suppliers that made less-expensive cheesecakes that he saw as inferior.

“Literally for $0.05, some of these restaurants would switch to another brand,” David Overton said.

To prove the demand for his mom’s desserts, he opened his own restaurant in Beverly Hills in 1978, despite having no restaurant experience. He named the restaurant The Cheesecake Factory after his parents’ bakery. 

On opening day, he was so nervous he didn’t open the restaurant until 2 p.m. to avoid the lunch rush. When the doors finally opened, the restaurant filled up within 10 minutes.

Due to his lack of restaurant experience, David Overton “created a simple and straightforward menu with generous portions,” The Cheesecake Factory told Business Insider.  

The original menu was a single-page, two-sided document, and it featured 60 items, many of which he knew how to cook himself.

One side featured lunch and dinner options such as burgers, hamburger steak, quiche of the day, and roasted chicken. Salads, grilled meats, and open-faced sandwiches included classic American staples such as crab Louie and tuna salad. One dish, Oscar’s special sardine sandwich, was named after his father.

Breakfast featured egg dishes, cereal, toast, and espresso drinks. 

The original dessert menu featured a variety of baked goods and desserts, including cheesecake, carrot cake, zucchini cake, strudel, whipped-cream cakes, chocolate-mousse pie, black forest cake, cream puffs, ice-cream sundaes, milkshakes, banana splits, and Belgian waffles topped with ice cream and whipped cream. The ice cream on the menu was billed as “extra rich.”

Prices ranged from $0.85 for a dish of ice cream to $1.95 for the chocolate-mousse pie. A slice of cheesecake cost $1.25.

The Beverly Hills salad bar was called the Fabulous Factory Salad Bar. The cost of a build-your-own salad was $1.95 for a medium plate or $2.95 for a large salad plate.

Salad bars at this time were more closely associated with steakhouses.  The first four Cheesecake Factory restaurants had salad bars. It stopped adding them when the fifth restaurant opened in 1991 in Washington, DC.

“There really were, in the area, high-end restaurants and then fast food, but there was really nothing in the middle,” Alethea Rowe, the senior director of public relations and global branding at The Cheesecake Factory, told Business Insider. “And David purposefully created a restaurant that was very much in the middle.”

It appealed to middle-class diners who, amid the boom of frozen and microwaved meals, enjoyed the restaurant’s made-from-scratch cooking.

The service also helped. Hostess Linda Candioty (pictured) started working for Evelyn Overton in the bakery in 1977. She became the restaurant’s first hostess and has held a variety of key positions within the company over the years. Today, she is the company’s vice president of guest experience.

“She knew how to please the guest,” David Overton said. “I loved operating. I love being in the background. She loved being in the foreground.”

The new location was in Marina del Rey, an affluent Los Angeles-area coastal community.

David Overton immediately fell in love with the location.

“I went there, and I said, ‘Wow, who wouldn’t want to sit out here and have a wonderful meal,'” he said.

Candioty, in the company video, described the bay location this way: “On the water. On the beach. Palm trees. Volleyball. Windsurfers. It was amazing. And it was a zoo from the beginning.”

The restaurant was packed full all summer.

“We became an instant hit. It took us about five years to recover from that opening,” she said.

After the success of the Marina del Rey restaurant, David Overton chose another coastal spot for its next location: Redondo Beach, California. 

After that, David Overton set a goal to open at least one restaurant every year or every two years.

“So we started to grow because of our success and because people loved our product, and our culture grew right along with it,” he said in the company video.

The Redondo Beach restaurant had a lot of empty wall space. So David Overton turned to employee Mary D’Astugues, who was known as an artist. He asked her to paint a ceiling mural and one behind the bar.

She painted while the restaurant was under construction.

“David really liked the aesthetic that Mary’s artwork added to the restaurant, and from that point forward, as each new Cheesecake Factory opened in cities across the country, Mary painted custom murals for each location,” the company told Business Insider.

David Overton, in a 2011 interview with CNN, said his parents were able to semi-retire as the restaurants performed well in the first several years. 

“Our investors were making a lot of money,” he said. “In September 1992, we went public. The stock opened at $20 and went to $27.25 the first day.” 

He became the CEO and chair of the board when the company went public. Before that, he was the company’s president. He is the only CEO the chain has ever had.

Today, the Cheesecake Factory ranks 36th among US chains by sales on Technomic’s top-500 list. Among casual dining chains, it’s ranked No. 9.

The restaurant opened in the Dubai Mall under a licensing agreement with Alshaya Trading Co.

The Cheesecake Factory has over 200 domestic restaurants and over 30 international locations. None of the US locations are franchised.

International restaurants are licensed locations. This is an unusual tactic for a large publicly traded company, which typically grows through franchising. Other publicly traded chains that don’t franchise include Chipotle and Shake Shack. 

Some of the 36 international locations have opened in top tourist destinations.

In 2016, the company opened its first restaurant in China. The location opened in Disneytown at the Shanghai Disney Resort.

The bread was launched under the Cheesecake Factory at Home brand.

Other restaurant items sold in grocery stores include a handful of whole frozen cheesecakes, including the original cheesecake and the strawberry-topped original cheesecake. 

To gain market share, DoorDash went after large, established restaurant chains. Early partnerships included The Cheesecake Factory, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Wendy’s.

While other restaurant chains have expanded delivery services to include other apps such as Uber Eats, Cheesecake Factory remains an exclusive delivery partner with DoorDash.

“It became evident that the combination of two of the most experiential and entrepreneurial restaurant companies could drive greater value as one organization,” David Overton said in a statement. 

The April 2020 investment helped The Cheesecake Factory’s “liquidity position” as it navigated the COVID-19 pandemic, David Overton said at the time.

In June 2021, The Cheesecake Factory reacquired most of the equity stake it had sold to Roark Capital in a transaction valued at $457.3 million, Restaurant Business reported.

New items are rolled out twice a year, replacing lower-performing items.

In a 2022 Vox article, the writer Alex Abad-Santos called The Cheesecake Factory an “uncanny” chain whose success was built on defying standard industry rules.

The chain’s massive menu is one of those industry-defying traditions. Most chains preach operational efficiency by providing a limited menu of dishes that are all profit generators.  

Not at The Cheesecake Factory. 

“The menu was seemingly written by someone who was hungry for everything they could think of but couldn’t name what they actually wanted at that moment,” Abad-Santos wrote. “The rules that govern regular restaurants have no power over The Cheesecake Factory. If there is one rule at The Cheesecake Factory, it’s that the conventional wisdom of the restaurant industry — keeping costs low, concepts simple, and menus under 200 items — is meant to be ignored.”

This cheesecake favorite combines all of Adam’s favorite childhood treats: Butterfingers, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, caramel, and the chain’s classic cheesecake.

The dish is made with broccoli, zucchini, asparagus, peppers, tomato, onion, garlic, and fresh herbs. It’s tossed with Parmesan.

It’s one of 14 pasta dishes listed on the menu. 

The fudge cake remains one of The Cheesecake Factory’s most beloved desserts, the company told Business Insider.

Avocado egg rolls are a top seller on the menu.

The inspiration for it came after David Overton tasted a crunchy avocado cheese straw while dining at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. Avocado was also used as a garnish on the dish. 

It made him wonder whether The Cheesecake Factory could make an egg roll stuffed with avocado chunks. Experimenting commenced, and after multiple tries, The Cheesecake Factory’s avocado egg rolls were developed.

Their exact debut is unknown, but they’ve been around since the late ’90s or very early 2000s, the company said. 

Business Insider got a behind-the-scenes look at how The Cheesecake Factory manages its massive menu, with chefs relying on coordinated prep stations, digital timers, and strict deadlines to keep orders moving.

Even though the menu hovers around 250 items, most are made from scratch. The one exception is the chain’s cheesecakes, which are delivered frozen to each restaurant and garnished with whipped cream during service.

Entrées are expected to be out about 15 minutes after they’re ordered, while appetizers have a seven-minute goal.

Although the chain continues adding around 10 new dishes each year, executives say the menu is nearing its practical limit due to the kitchen’s complexity.