Why is Dining with Dad on a Wednesday? Alex just recently started his very first job. He’s working at Jersey Mike’s and so far is having fun with it. Because he’s the new young guy, he’ll be working every weekend evening since no one else wants that shift. Given that he will now be unavailable for Dining with Dad on the normal Friday night, we have had to move it. I asked the kids if they’d rather move it to lunch on Saturday’s or just an open night throughout the week, they decided they’d rather keep it as dinner and find an open night throughout the week. So here we are having it on Wednesday for the very first time.

This was originally scheduled before we knew Alex was working. Since Friday is Chloe’s 12th birthday, I had asked her if she wanted to choose where we went (a normal birthday tradition) or keep it a surprise as every Dining with Dad is. She likes the surprise each time so she wanted me to pick. Given that she likes cheesecake even more than traditional birthday cake, I thought how great it would be to go somewhere with good cheesecake that we can get for her birthday, so this is how this week’s location was decided, The Cheesecake Factory.

Chloe decided to eat “light” knowing that she was getting cheesecake and ordered off the kids menu. Even though she had spaghetti at home last night, she likes it so much she went for the kids Marinara Pasta. I think she ate a bit too much of the bread that they bring out as she didn’t quite finish her pasta but did say it was very good.

Alex took a look at the kids menu too but didn’t see anything he wanted. I was looking at the menu and he noticed that they had steak so he asked to look at those options. He was between the Steak Diane and the Chargrilled New York Steak. He asked my opinion and I offered the suggestion that the Steak Diane comes with a mushroom sauce but the New York comes just seasoned so he went for the Steak Diane because he liked the idea of the sauce. I ordered it Medium for him (obviously the max temperature for a steak) and he loved it. I got to cleanup what he didn’t eat and it was very good.

I was on the seafood page when Alex saw the steaks on the opposite side of the menu. I was all set to enjoy the Herb Crusted Filet of Salmon. Of course, with my normal bad luck, they were “out” of this. In fact, he said there were no salmon dishes available because they didn’t get their delivery of salmon this week. Everyone was ready to eat so I felt a little rushed to make a quick replacement decision. As we all know, The Cheesecake Factory has a big menu so this might be difficult. On a tangent thought, the menu is smaller than it used to be. I haven’t been there since before the pandemic so I’m assuming they needed to trim it down due to that. Since I was already on the page with the steaks and Alex was deciding between the two, I decided to get the Chargrilled New York Steak so that if he didn’t like his, he could have mine. The steak was cooked to a nice medium rare and was juicy with a great seasoning grilled onto the outside. No steak sauce needed here! I was very happy with my rapid decision.

Obviously we were all getting cheesecake. We ordered it to go so that it was already packaged up but wanted to grab a few bites before we left. Chloe and Alex both went for the very simple traditional Fresh Strawberry Cheesecake. I usually go for one of the two peanut butter selections but wanted to try something new that I haven’t had before. I went with the Coconut Cream Pie Cheesecake. I told the kids to hang on a second so I could grab some pictures but they told me, “Nah, no pictures. Let’s just enjoy it.” How can you argue with that? So sorry, you’ll have to head over to The Cheesecake Factory yourself if you’d like to see these.

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