Adventures at The Cheesecake Factory

Continuing our fun from the trip to Hot Dog Johnny's a while back, the girls - Alge, Becky, Erin - and I decided to take a trip to The Cheesecake Factory. (To clarify, that is the name of the restaurant, it is not a factory where they make cheesecake - more on that later.)
So, we went on a Saturday afternoon thinking it wouldn't be too crowded. Boy were we wrong! I guess people really love this place at lunch time. It was PACKED! We only had to wait 15 minutes though, which was good. When we first walked into the place, we realized that it was fancier than we anticipated. There were people dressed up like they were going to church, and here we are in our hoodies and jeans. Alge had on her basketball jersey! Needless to say, we felt a bit out of place. But they hadn't thrown us out, so we were going to eat there gosh darn it.
We finally got seated and learned that there would be two servers taking care of us. One of them was named Shannon, and I'll be darned if we even saw the second one. We opened the menu which was more like a short novel rather than a menu. There was 5 pages of booze, 3 pages of dessert and about 8 pages of real food. Since the girls weren't exactly rolling in dough, they decided to order appetizers and/or a burger. Poor Becky could only afford french fries. Erin had popcorn shrimp, Alge had a burger, and I had buffalo wings.
The food wasn't bad. I've definitely had better wings. They weren't worth $9 I can tell you that much. I can get better (hotter) wings at Chicken Holiday for $3.99. But I digress. Then, it came time to contemplate the cheesecake. There were about 20 different types of cheesecake (hence the restaurant name) to choose from. I went with the Key Lime cheesecake seen here:



Alge and Erin both ordered some massively chocolate cheesecakes which were too chocolatey, even for me.

After consuming about 5000 calories-worth of dessert, we decided to go walk around the mall (I forgot to mention that this place was attached to Menlo Park Mall) to burn off all those calories. Becky asked if we could go see the puppies at the pet store. Sure! I love puppies as much as the next guy. When we got there, we saw the cutest puppy in history, and we asked if we would take her out and play with her. The girl at the counter actually carded me so we could do this! The puppy was a puggle - a cross between a poodle and a pug. Take a look at this face, is it not the cutest????



Here's Becky holding the puppy. She wanted me to buy it, but alas, I could not.


A good time was had by all. And going forward, we have agreed to do one fun restaurant trip a month. Next month's trip? Chick-Fil-A baby!