When opening a restaurant, the architectural design and layout is almost as important as the food on guests' plates. It's what distinguishes your eatery as either a family-oriented place or a hip millennial brunch spot; the design elements stick with customers long after the food is gone.
Millions of dollars go into designing restaurants, so why is it then that one particular chain seems to throw all modern notions of "good" design to the wind? I'm talking, of course, about The Cheesecake Factory.
You don't even need to walk into one of these shopping mall restaurants to know it's extra. The outside is painted to look like the aged walls of an Italian piazza, an ornate archway welcomes guests through the heavy glass doors and often, you'll find a massive dome atop the entryway. The only unifying design element here is decadence, which might make sense, considering we're talking about a restaurant with 34 varieties of cheesecake and a meal containing over an entire day's worth of calories on the menu.
One Twitter user named Max took it upon himself to delve deep into the world of Cheesecake Factory's head-scratching designs. His Twitter thread reads like a captivating tale of the architectural world's wild, wild West -- a "world of aesthetic chaos," where greco-roman cornices, pseudo-hieroglyphics and anything else that screams "luxury" all come together as one mind-boggling restaurant theme.
Nothing I can say will compare to Max's expert analysis, fraught with tales of American capitalism run amok, all packaged (not so) neatly into one international dining experience. So, without further ado, I present to you the most epic analysis of The Cheesecake Factory ever written.