Cleveland games developer Max Sledroom went on a Twitter tear about the amazing, surreal, awful design experience that is The Cheesecake Factory, a place whose calorie bombs rank among America's deadliest, and whose strange religious projects have made headlines.
Sledroom dates the Cheesecake Factory's bizarre design aesthetic to 1992, when the company hired hospitality designer Rick McCormack, whose interiors are "a mix between a Fry's Electronics, an overgrown Panera, and a laser tag arena."
It's a strange exercise in one-molecule-thick a "luxury dining" aesthetic, where "they serve you water in tankards, seat you in wicker chairs at marble tabletops. Then you realize your tankards are plastic, your wicker is plastic, and your table is vinyl-lined particle board."
Then there are the menus, four of them, which advertise the restaurant you're already eating at.
There is nothing more quintessentially "American capitalism" in flavor than The Cheesecake Factory
Wealth run wild. Chaotic visual fantasies realized w no aesthetic discipline. An obsession with appearance of luxury. Gross excess that excels at feigning its quality
It feels like a relic of another era, one where such a vision was sold to the American public as a utopian concept. It, like the brief period of neoliberalistic prosperity that made it possible, is a fever dream made manifest. Enjoy it while you can.
If you want a fully immersive "postmodern design hellscape" themed dining experience I highly recommend dinner at The Cheesecake Factory
from a design perspective that place is fuckin wild and I'll talk a little bit about why pic.twitter.com/0RHFDjKsuo
— max sledroom ❄ (@MaxKriegerVG) November 17, 2017
(via Marginal Revolution)
