Word: pasta
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...restaurant unless it gets through Joaquin Marchan, a star Cheesecake Factory line cook who now puts new recipes through their road tests. It's here that the free-form lasagna started to fall apart. Okura and his chefs had perfected two versions of the dish, layers of pasta, cheese and sauce: one with roasted tomato sauce adorned with basil oil, the other an all-beef Bolognese with truffle...
...under a cheese melter, with Okura and Matz hovering like anxious trainers at the edge of a boxing ring. "You don't have to go so fast," Okura says, giving him a calming pat on the shoulders. He and Matz then shift gears. Instead of having him blanch the pasta, they want Marchan to finish cooking it in the sauté pan and then assemble the layers. His lasagna looks messier than the chef's version. Okura checks the clock. "Eight minutes," he says. "Eight minutes is a long time on a busy night." Even worse, "it's a little mushy...
...repository for all other corporate-restaurant concepts." Overton can live with that. "We just try to be really good, with strong flavors," he says. "Authenticity isn't anything that we really care about." He's ready for the purists who will complain that the cured meat in a new pasta amatriciana really ought to be guanciale, made from pork jowls, rather than pancetta, pork belly. "You know what? Most of our people do not care," Overton says...
Strong sales are the only measure of success that really matter for any of the new dishes that will soon appear on the menu. The lasagna got the ax, but the Bolognese sauce with white truffle oil will get a shot as a pasta entrée, along with a spinach, poached-chicken and bacon salad, a crab hash made with potatoes and onions and the pasta with four roasted tomato sauces--including puttanesca without anchovies. If they don't sell, they're gone, no matter how much Overton or any critic loves or loathes them...
...this way, the Cheesecake Factory is the closest thing in the restaurant business to democracy in action. Overton reminisces about dishes he loved that never found a constituency: the torpedo dog, a kosher hot dog with red onions and sweet mustard baked into a pizza-dough crust; a pasta made with melted onions, cream and cognac. White-chocolate macadamia nut had been a top-10 cheesecake flavor for years, but it has fallen to the bottom five and is on the way out. Lamb and veal might appeal to critics, but "we just can't sell it," Overton says. Special...