One of my favorite restaurants is THE CHEESECAKE FACTORY ON LAS OLAS BOULEVARD in Fort Lauderdale. In the year 2000, for my Sweet 16 Leap year party part of the all day celebration a group of us had lunch at TCF sampling most of their cheesecakes.

Las Olas Boulevard is a long stretch of various upscale shops and restaurants. For the past few years the county has been working at making the west end, starting at the Broward Performing Arts Center, the Riverwalk, Las Olas combining the Las Olas bridge to the Fort Lauderdale beach at the east end, to one extraordinary walking or driving experience.

As much as I love TCF it has now become a rare restaurant to stop and have lunch because of the prices and parking but we did go the other day and I was reminded as to why I love it so much. If you are on a diet I suggest you DON’T look at this slideshow--it will prove to be fattening!

It starts off innocently enough with the first 3 photos showing a block on Las Olas Boulevard with one of the oldest and newly renovated hotels in the city The Riverside and then the entrance to The Cheesecake Factory showing just some of their outside seating.

#4 is the chicken in a scampi sauce that I had and #5 the chicken tomato basil penne that Allen had. #8 is Edgar who has been the host there for 7,8 years and always has a warm welcome for us. (On this day the 20+ story Bank of America building had a fire in there restaurant and the whole building was evacuated and, it seems, the they all came to TCF to have lunch while they waited to get the okay signal to get back to work but we were seated almost immediately!

Photos # 6 (snickers cheesecake) #9 white chocolate cheesecake, #11 Godiva chocolate cheesecake #12 Blueberry cheesecake and #13 so called plain cheesecake are just some of the many cheesecakes from the #10 display case. You can see the cakes in front but not the ones in back.

#7 Some guy you might know chomping away!

Aside from all the cheesecake items they have 4 different menus: the regular menu with over 200 items, the ‘special item’ menu, the lunch menu and the thinlicious menu, the latter serving main courses with only 590 calories--of course we won’t get into the calorie count of the cheesecakes!

By the way we are very  proud of ourselves in that we didn’t stop at the new Italian bakery and gelato shop on the way back to the car!

Though I am sure I will get to TCF a couple of times before my birthday I have a feeling that going their with some of the out of town guests will take place as part of the celebration! :O)

WARNING: THIS SLIDESHOW CAN BE FATTENING!

https://youtu.be/ab0p_ZmdU5s