The Cheesecake Factory can’t get enough of the Gen Z ‘Tuscan moms’
By Ramishah Maruf, CNN
New York (CNN) — It’s always going to be 2006 at the Cheesecake Factory. And for the crowds of young people dining there in cheetah print and sunglasses bigger than the restaurant’s portions, that’s exactly how they want it.
Take Caroline Fisher, a 23-year-old in Phoenix who embodies the “Tuscan mom” aesthetic, a style rooted in the nostalgia of early 2000s suburban mothers in Italian-themed kitchens.
On one night at the Cheesecake Factory, Fisher wore boot-cut flare jeans, a chunky brown belt and wedge heels that she thrifted. She straightened her platinum blonde hair and added a bump-it. She thinned her eyebrows and did a smoky eye with gold eyeshadow. The playlist on the way to the restaurant featured Norah Jones and Maroon 5, hitmakers from the aughts.
Fisher is among the mostly younger diners who have channeled “Desperate Housewives” at Cheesecake Factory, the gaudy chain restaurant known for its warm mood lighting and towering columns. And these “Tuscan moms” receive hundreds of thousands of views on social media.
Fisher ordered a salad and french fries, and split a bottle of wine with her friend. Her friend ordered off the chain’s Skinnylicious menu — “the ultimate Tuscan mom” lineup, she said.
The chain, which has over 200 locations in the United States, was recently caught in a culture war against its will, sparked by a joke from former President Barack Obama on its aesthetic. But the more interesting story is just how well the Cheesecake Factory is doing. Its stock soared above Big Tech this year (it trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol CAKE). It just reported its second consecutive quarter with more than $1 billion in revenue.
A big reason for that? Social media trends like the Tuscan mom aesthetic, largely driven by younger consumers.
The company credited its expanded role on social media for much of its success in its latest earnings call last Wednesday. “A very large percentage” of guests skew younger, CFO Matthew Clark said.
When any nondescript suburb opens a Cheesecake Factory, there’s no restaurant around that can compare to its palatial grandeur. It’s a “postmodern melange of a bunch of different references that looks almost otherworldly because it doesn’t really fit into one box perfectly,” Evan Collins, a designer and co-founder of the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, told CNN.
The plethora of options in its phone book-sized menu “naturally lends itself to engaging and shareable social content,” the company’s president, David Gordon, said on the call. The Cheesecake Factory notably did not acknowledge the political discourse whirling around it, and did not respond to CNN’s request for comment on the Tuscan mom aesthetic.
What is ‘the Tuscan mom?’
The Tuscan mom trend is rooted in nostalgia. Think over-sized kitchens with dark cabinetry, granite countertops, artificial grapes and many, many rooster decorations.
The Tuscan mom aesthetic reached peak popularity on Pinterest this summer, around the time the Cheesecake Factory topped $1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time.
The appeal of the Tuscan mom aesthetic spans from fashion and beauty to interior design, Pinterest said. Searches for “Tuscan mom outfit” rose 4,975% year-over-year; “2000s Tuscan mom,” meanwhile, jumped 1,501%.
It echoes a time that Americans often romanticize: the housing boom before the 2008 crash, when purchasing an overvalued McMansion as a gateway to the upper-middle class was still feasible.
People were able to afford “driving in a nice Lincoln Navigator, bedazzled jeans and a fancy top, and going to the spa, and then after that going to Starbucks and Cheesecake Factory,” Collins, the designer, told CNN.
Nikole Jackson, a 32-year-old from San Antonio, Texas, described it as “2000s mature, not the whole Britney Spears type of 2000s, but more catered toward the Kardashians, who had more of a regal type of look to them.”
The Cheesecake Factory, unlike its other suburban strip-plaza counterparts like Starbucks and Barnes & Noble, has held on to that aesthetic, Jackson said.
“A lot of places have lost that character and replaced it with this almost bright, stark white clinical appearance,” Jackson said. “And thankfully, Cheesecake Factory never lost that.”
Cheesecakes are winning
“Everything that they’re doing is resonating with guests,” Citi equity research analyst Jon Tower told CNN.
It started with the addition of “Bites” and “Bowls” to its appetizer menu last year, smaller portions of dishes like Chicken & Waffle Skewers and Teriyaki Salmon bowls at a lower price. But most importantly, Tower said, the company recently got a new creative agency as it took off on the internet.
Soon, social media began trending with the revelation that almost everything on the Cheesecake Factory’s gargantuan menu is made from scratch (except the cheesecake). For many inflation-fatigued consumers, the fresh food, huge portions and fancy atmosphere are worth the price.
“When I get my herb-crested chicken parm, there’s three chicken pieces on that plate,” Jackson said. “And of course, they give you a bunch of bread.”
Food influencers began vlogging from the cushioned red booths in the past year. One viral “order hack” — the cajun salmon platter with cajun shrimp and extra Parmesan cream sauce — actually led to higher sales of the longtime menu staple, according to the earnings call.
While social media trends come and go as quickly as the free bread at the Cheesecake Factory, Tower said the company has no shortage of content to work with.
“They’ve got 250-plus menu items to play with,” he said.
Paying no attention to a ‘controversy’
Obama’s recent remarks on the Cheesecake Factory stirred up conversations again on the restaurant’s aesthetic. He joked that President Donald Trump has “got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”
It quickly imploded, starting with accusations from right-leaning media of Obama-era elitism and ending with a former GOP congressman “clinging to my guns and religion at the Greensboro Cheesecake Factory tonight.”
But followers of the Tuscan mom lifestyle had little to say about the comment, if they were even keeping up with the controversy.
“Listen, the White House may look how it looks, but I think that the Cheesecake Factory does not deserve the slander because I love it,” Fisher said.
The-CNN-Wire
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