At 2 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, I found myself in a corner booth at the Cheesecake Factory, emerging from the fog of war.
Before me were a dozen half-empty plates, a cluster of dirty napkins, and several depleted beverages. The food had come in waves, unrelenting, like Normandy. There had been egg rolls, four ways; Roadside Sliders; a sheet tray of Factory Nachos; and something called Chicken Parmesan “Pizza Style.” Coke Zeros, I’d told the waitress at the beginning, and keep ’em coming. There had also been cake. Much cake.
I checked in with myself. I was nauseous, for sure. But another feeling, too, was detectable within the churning volcano of my digestive tract: It was something like joy.
Let’s back up. Over the weekend, Barack Obama criticized President Trump’s schlocky White House aesthetic by saying it looked like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” My first reaction was to laugh. It’s true! The restaurant is over-the-top opulent—as if ancient Egypt and Tuscany had a baby in Las Vegas. Any true Cheesecake Factory fan would certainly appreciate the joke, especially if they remembered the Iraq War and Saddam’s own design sensibilities.
What happened next, though, was disheartening. “Hasn’t eaten dinner that costs less than $250 in years. Has never been in a Cheesecake Factory,” the conservative commentator Scott Jennings wrote on X. “Undefeated at condescending to regular folks.” Other Republicans, and even some Democrats, logged on to police the former president’s tone. This was classic elitist Obama, they argued, making fun of the working man and his primitive taste. It was why Trump won and why Democrats will never win back blue-collar America. My “For You” page filled with commentary about which political party could more confidently claim ideological custody over the Cheesecake Factory.
Immediately, my head began to swirl like the raspberry drizzle in a Georgia Peach cocktail. My rage was congealing, like Cheddar Cheese Fondue on room-temperature Pretzel Bites. Enough! I wanted to scream. Leave the Cheesecake Factory out of your culture wars! Like any number of kitschy, charming American chain restaurants—Rainforest Cafe, Johnny Rockets, and even, God love them, Applebee’s—the Factory can obviously be mocked. But it must be mocked from a place of love. It should exist above partisan politics as a sacred third space, one of the few we Americans have left.
Quickly enough, my frustration gave way to hunger, then introspection, and then to investigatory zeal. Which is how, an hour later, I ended up at the Cheesecake Factory. (I was helped along the path by my editor, who said I could expense everything.)
My friends joined me at the restaurant, a block from the White House. No one asked why we were rushing to get a table. It wasn’t busy—just a handful of tourists and families—and we were seated quickly in a quiet corner, where James Blunt emerged softly from the speaker system. I looked around at the design, which I had seen plenty of times but never quite absorbed before: There were orange faux-marble ceiling beams, trellis-patterned dividers, and columns with faux-tile inlay. The vibe was vaguely Italian, loosely Moorish. There were no gilded trophies or signs, but I could see Obama’s point. I explained his joke to our waitress, who seemed about 20 and well-adjusted enough to not be spending time on X. She laughed. “Oh, damn, we caught a stray!” she said. “That’s funny, though. Maybe that’s why we’re slow this morning.”
I knew that I loved the Cheesecake Factory before I ever went inside one. “Too expensive,” my mother would say before steering me toward the food court. But peering through the windows of the restaurant at Jordan Creek Town Center in Des Moines, I was awed by its sumptuousness: the orange, inviting glow from the knobbly chandeliers; the floral frescoes and painted columns; the generous fountain pops and the dense wedges of cake. It wasn’t attempting highbrow elegance but, rather, embracing a kind of madcap largesse, like a zany aunt who wears a lot of bracelets. Inside the Cheesecake Factory, everyone always seemed to be laughing.
[From the May 2026 issue: The best free bread in America]
Trump, Saddam, and the Cheesecake Factory share an unabashed commitment to aesthetic maximalism. To be sure, this commitment is slightly more appealing in a restaurant than in the office of a democratically elected leader of a country founded on the explicit rejection of monarchy. And there is obviously nothing appealing about Saddam’s palaces, or Saddam himself—which is why it is unfair to associate Saddam with the Cheesecake Factory in any way. I didn’t cover the Iraq War personally, being too young, but I can still promise you with a high degree of confidence that there were no Thai Lettuce Wraps on offer at the Babylon Palace. Laughter and togetherness were not, I gather, the order of the day at Qasr al-Nihayah.
Still, by all accounts, Saddam appreciated food—and especially, in spite of everything, American food. He was reportedly a great lover of hamburgers. After he was tried and convicted, but before he was hanged, his guards said he could polish off entire family-size bags of Doritos. (Nacho Cheese, I’d guess.) For breakfast, he apparently delighted in Raisin Bran Crunch. Just like my father.
Saddam might have been a happier, more reasonable dictator if he’d had a Cheesecake Factory nearby (this is what is known in journalism as a comically irrefutable assertion). The thing about the Cheesecake Factory is that the food is not simply good. It is absurdly varied, original, and, at times, totally, gloriously incomprehensible—a delicious crime against nature. The Cheesecake Factory has achieved in menu-crafting what Saddam was rarely able to achieve in weapons-manufacturing.
When we ordered our favorites yesterday, we tried to imagine what the Butcher of Baghdad might have enjoyed best. We had hamburgers three ways: Double Smash Cheeseburger Bites, burger sliders (which proved suspiciously similar to the Bites), and juicy cheeseburger meat wrapped in a crispy shell. We ate piping hot macaroni-and-cheese balls, and saucy shredded chicken fried and sculpted into crunchy, almost papery triangles. Would Saddam have ordered the Buffalo Blasts? Of course he would have.
And these were just the appetizers! Later, we ate the Chicken Parm “Pizza Style” that was essentially a flattened chicken pie, topped with a coil of angel-hair pasta. We also had Chicken Madeira; a pile of thick, garlic mashed potatoes; and a grilled branzino, which I ordered because it was the dish that seemed to most resemble Saddam’s’s reported Iraqi favorite, masgouf, a roasted river fish. (Some other fun facts my friends and I learned in several minutes of Googling: Saddam apparently wrote a popular romance novel about himself. He was once given the key to the city of Detroit. The closest Cheesecake Factory to Baghdad is in Kuwait.)
We punctuated our meal with an alcohol-forward Lava Flow Punch, a Mai Tai, and the Georgia Peach, the Factory’s twist on a cocktail recommended by the rapper Drake. “We’re not driving today, right?” the waitress asked us at one point, looking nervous. We were not. But we were getting dessert. We requested a few of the restaurant’s namesake items, including a sprinkle-speckled Celebration Cheesecake featuring a birthday candle simply because we wanted one; plus a Chocolate Caramelicious Cheesecake With Snickers—a cake so out of control that after a single bite, one of my friends put down her spoon and exclaimed, “This is messed up!”
Indeed it was. Ultimately, it was a meal fit for a dictator, but one to be enjoyed by regular people. This, to me, is the beauty of the Cheesecake Factory. It is America at its utmost—all decadence, performance, and fun. The Cheesecake Factory is for all of us. Can’t we come together on this most American of pastimes—pursuing a deeply uncomfortable yet utterly satisfying food coma—without enlisting in the culture war?