Twitter Is Fascinated By Cheesecake Factory's Vintage One-Page Menu

There are three things Cheesecake Factory is known for: delicious cheesecake, great food, and a massive menu. Per Thrillist, it comes in 21 pages with 250 items. The menu grew this way naturally as founder David Marshall Overton realized his talent for cooking and the challenge of converting luxury dishes into something a bit more casual. "I'd work on new menu items with a cook, behind the line. And as we kept expanding the menu, people kept responding positively," he said. The brand stuck to the concept over time, adding dishes constantly to ward off any competition. "Finally, I thought, 'Well, there's nothing that America wants that we shouldn't be able to put on the menu.' So, we just kept at it," Overton said.

When a Reddit user asked how the restaurant's employees handle such a large menu, a responder gave some insight into how things run smoothly. "It's a truly unique concept, but it only functions successfully at very high volume. If their food sales are too low, then they need to make their menus considerably smaller to make them work in their favor," they wrote. So basically, the size of the menu is easily done if volume stays high. According to their response, employees also go through extensive and frequent training.

With all this talk about the Cheesecake Factory's giant menu, would you believe us if we told you it was once a single page?

Long before the chapter-book menu – Cheesecake Factory is known for today — was created, it was a more humble, one page menu consisting of just 26 items (per Vox). The menu, which was broken into three sections (specialties, salads and cold plates, and sandwich creations) included burgers, salads, hot dogs, and cheese melts. Founder and CEO David Marshall Overton said the original menu was meant to be minimal to draw most of the attention to the cheesecake, according to Thrillist. "I wasn't a chef, I had no experience in the restaurant business either, and I didn't want any chef we hired to walk out on me. So, I made sure that everything we served, was something I could make myself," he said.

After a Twitter user posted the old-fashioned menu to the platform, commenters were in awe for more than one reason. Some users immediately noticed the pricing differences from now and then, with one comment reading, "What year are these prices...because I want to go back to that." A few others were fascinated by the number of avocado dishes on the menu. "They should have called it The Avocado Factory," one person wrote. And of course, some Twitter users had comments regarding the noticeably smaller menu size, though hilariously, the font was still as miniscule as the newer menu. "This is like when a teacher allows students to have one index card with notes on it to reference when taking an exam," one person wrote.