He Said:
Last month I visited Jacksonville.
It gets worse.
While there, I was dragged against my will to a Cheesecake Factory, where I encountered a menu only a little bit slimmer than a Manhattan phonebook. You remember phonebooks, don’t you? Strange artifacts, now extinct, of time when all of your contacts weren’t in your pocket 24/7.
But I couldn’t accuse the cheesecake guys of lying. ‘Factory,’ after all was part of their name, and a factory is exactly what this was. A suburban dining assembly line, resolutely stamping, riveting, pressing, and deploying every item on a Brobdingnagian bill of fare. I immediately made myself less popular among my co-workers by pointing out the rather obvious fact that no establishment can turn out credible representations of twenty different cuisines made-to-order out of one dining room.
It was not a good night.
Such was not the case, however, at the restaurant wrapped around an oven that is Ancora Pizzeria and Salumeria, where we made a long overdue visit last weekend. Continue reading
