The Controversial Origins Of The Cheesecake Factory's Brown Bread

A "snowball rolling down the culinary hill of time." This is how one Los Angeles Times article describes The Cheesecake Factory, a restaurant known for its eclectic styling and insanely decadent menu. One look at the restaurant's offerings makes it easy to see just how apt this comparison is. According to its menu, there are numerous food categories ranging from appetizers to titular cheesecakes. Drill down into the menu further and you'll see that each category is chockfull of items. For instance, the "Glamburgers" page features a whopping 13 selections, including burgers topped with macaroni and cheese or stuffed with cheddar.

As explained on the restaurant's about us page, The Cheesecake Factory was born out of one woman's dream to provide the very best home-cooked cheesecakes to customers. That woman was Evelyn Overton, who opened her first cheesecake bakery with the help of her husband Oscar in 1972. In an effort to garner interest in his mother's tasty creations, son David Overton opened a restaurant a few years later in 1978. The Beverly Hills establishment quickly became a massive hit, and The Cheesecake Factory continues to impress diners to this day. One particularly popular item is actually served for free (per Insider) and is a far cry from the establishment's more extravagant creations.

It's a little surprising that a seemingly inconspicuous loaf of bread would garner such acclaim in the minds of diners, but that's precisely how people feel about The Cheesecake Factory's brown bread, aka the whole wheat baguette. According to TODAY, the restaurant's Chief Culinary Officer Donald Moore even compares the bread to McDonald's iconic French fries in terms of its legendary status among guests. The bread is so popular that the chain has begun selling it in stores, as stated by the website's bread page.

The Cheesecake Factory is naturally reluctant to share its recipe, lest patrons get their brown bread fix elsewhere, but Taste of Home features a close replica. Along with your standard bread ingredients, this recipe also calls for a few tasty extras. Brown bread gets its color from cocoa powder, which also lends a subtle, chocolatey taste to the recipe. Color and flavor are amplified even further by the inclusion of molasses, while honey adds a touch of sweetness. Then there's espresso powder, which is used to augment the rich flavoring imparted by the cocoa powder and molasses. There's no denying these ingredients are real crowd-pleasers, but the same cannot be said for brown bread's original name.

While The Cheesecake Factory's most notable bread is typically referred to as "brown bread," it was inspired, as Thrillist explains, by German "squaw bread," which itself was based on a Native American bread recipe. As noted by NPR, the word squaw was derived from the Algonquian people and originally meant "woman." However, it eventually evolved into an ugly, offensive slur. In fact, in 2021 U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, motioned to get the word removed from all Federal lands.

The word squaw also garners offense when associated with food products. The Daily Bulletin reports on one instance involving a Rancho Cucamonga bakery and its use of the term. While the owners claimed no offense, stating that they thought the word was a "term of endearment" based on its usage within their family, they received many messages on social media urging them to change the name. 

While it's hard to avoid controversy when it comes to public opinion, upholding customers' requests to retain their dignity and self-respect through language is always the right move.