On the night Erik and Lyle Menendez killed their parents, they offered an elaborate, twisted and ultimately unbelievable explanationof those crucial hours in 1989.
They said they screened Tim Burton’s “Batman” at a movie theater in Century City, cruised over to Santa Monica for a food festival, then stopped by the house for a second before planning to meet friends for dinner at an uber-trendy Beverly Hills eatery. But when they got home, they claimed to find their parents shot multiple times.
The destination for that aborted dinner? The Cheesecake Factory.
The eatery, famous for its gaudy interiors, huge portions and even huger calorie counts, has been thrust into the 2026 midterm elections. It started when Barack Obama joked that President Trump renovated the White House to look like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”
Trump and his allies fired back, both accusing Obama of elitism and taking great offense at the comparison. “For you to say it’s a Cheesecake Factory, that just shows why you were a lousy president,” Trump said.
The Cheesecake Factory is many things. But above all else it’s a very California invention.
The eatery opened inauspiciously in 1978, a modest, shockingly restrained space in Beverly Hills’ elite golden triangle.
It was known for a lot of food (and many cheesecake varieties) at reasonable prices in a Rodeo Drive setting — affordable opulence. The operators gained inspiration from the fancy places around them, including Wolfgang Puck’s Spago. But the mission was to offer the average Joe a luxury experience.
By the time the Menendez brothers used it as part of their alibi, the restaurant was hot.
The Cheesecake Factory we know today came with a major expansion in the 1990s. This is when we got the eclectic interiors of marble, polished wood, Roman columns morphing into palm trees in a look that blended architectural styles from Egypt, England, Italy, France and any number of other places. Sure, you were now eating at a shopping mall and not in the booth next to Sylvester Stallone, but the experience needed to still feel glitzy.
Rick McCormack, the architect behind the look, credited founder David Overton with the inspiration, saying he wanted to evoke funky 1970s San Francisco restaurants located in grand Victorian houses.
“We have these French limestone floors, then we throw in some Egyptian columns, Victorian beadboard wood paneling — a really eclectic mix — which most people wouldn’t be brave enough to try,” McCormack told Eaterin an excellent 2017 history of the Cheesecake Factory.
As for Overton, he revealed to the Associated Press in 1998 that he sometimes consulted with an astrologer to pick the right date to open new locations.
“I think that Cheesecake Factory is a lot like Southern California because there’s a very eclectic group of people that live in California that come from all parts of the country,” David Gordon, president of the company, told Vice in a 2016 oral history.
There are now Cheesecake Factories everywhere. And somewhere along the way, it became cool to be snarky about them. The oversize menus. The excessive portions. The legendary caloric values. The look that seems so out of place in a culture of clean modern lines.
Writer Christina Catherine Martinez wrote an essay for Image magazine citing theCheesecake Factory as an early example of a “Euro-blend” style of architecture that has swept L.A. shopping centers and apartments in the last two decades. It “has much to do with real estate scions fancying themselves purveyors of a new Renaissance, but the buildings themselves are less inspired by Renaissance principles than vague stabs at worldliness.”
But is the Cheesecake Factory trying to be tasteful — or something else?
Asked about the collision of styles that marked his restaurant interiors, Overton once explained it this way: “I wanted something timeless.”
He succeeded. Because in the graveyard of closed “it” L.A. restaurants, the Cheesecake Factory is still going strong.
Times librarian Cary Schneider contributed to this report.
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