KENTWOOD, Mich. (WOOD) — The monthslong waitis nearly over: West Michigan’s first Cheesecake Factory opens to the public on Tuesday.
Employees were bustling Friday, cooking, plating and serving during a lunch run-through ahead of the new Woodland Mallrestaurant’s grand opening.
Construction crews spent roughly four months transforming the former site of Bar Louie off 28th Street into the award-winning restaurant. The 8,500 square-foot space can seat 225 people inside and 75 others outside.
The new restaurant has also led to new jobs —299 of them, according to The Cheesecake Factory’s senior director of public relations, Alethea Rowe.
“We had 2,000 applicants actually for those 299 positions, and our managers were really able to hand-select the very best of applicants, and we’re just thrilled with the staff we hired,” she said, adding that the employees are all locals, with the exception of management.
While founder David Overton opened the first Cheesecake Factory on the West Coast, the restaurant’s roots are in Michigan.
“In the 1940s, Evelyn Overton found a recipe for a cheesecake in a Detroit newspaper. She made some tweaks to it to make it her own and started making cheesecakes for friends and family. But then in 1978, her son David opened a restaurant in Beverly Hills, California, really to showcase his mom’s cheesecakes. And then really, the rest is history. Forty-one years later, we have our second restaurant now in Michigan, but we have restaurants all over the country and around the world. So, it is all thanks to that Detroit newspaper in the 1940s,” said Rowe.
The Cheesecake Factory now has 203 locations in the U.S. and Toronto, Canada, as well as two dozen licensed restaurants in other countries.
The Kentwood restaurant’s interior includes The Cheesecake Factory’s traditional lighting and color palette, but it also has a unique touch.
Read more at 24 hour news 8.