So here’s the deal. I was in France for a bit, exploring around and checking out the provences, honing my skills and testing out different foods. I see an advertisement, hand-lettered, for “cheese cake”, in English, in a small cafe. I am elated.

I go in and order the cheesecake, excited to eat something familiar and sentimental to me, and it arrives. It looks normal, and smells okay. So I dig in. It tastes a little funky, which probably should have tipped me off, and halfway through, I realize it’s a cheese cake. Cheese. As in, blue cheese, highly sweetened, with mushrooms.

Here’s where the ER comes in. I am highly allergic to mushrooms, hives, swelling, the whole bit. Realizing this, I blurt out as much of an explanation as I can, all the while cursing the gods that I couldn’t just find a damned Cheesecake Factory and that cognates weren’t a little more simple.

To make a long story short, I spent the remainder of my vacation recovering. It sucked. I can no longer trust hand-written signs advertising cheese cake. Gotta be one word from now on, guys!

Hope I win…

“It might have been the greatest random thing to ever happen to me.” – Love it!

Also, only been to The Cheesecake Factory once and it was okay. There was nothing bad about it and there was nothing good about it. It’s one of those places where if I went there, I’d be satisified.

As for my best cheesecake story: Around Christmas time five years ago, I received a suspicious package at my front door addressed to a former resident of my condo. Not knowing what the package was or how in the world to get a hold of the actual addressee, I figured I’d open the package and check it out (I saw the return address was a mail order dessert company) so that it didn’t go bad. Yes, this sounds like that Friends episode, but this one is true. Much to my surprise and delight, I opened the package to find a cheesecake sampler wheel of eight different kinds of cheesecakes! I tore through about half of that thing in the next five minutes and then “gradually” finished the rest over the next two days. It might have been the greatest random thing to ever happen to me.

Usually when a see a restaurant that offers many different types of cuisines on its menu, I always fear the worst. A lot of places can’t even get one cuisine right. How can I expect them to get 5 right? Surprisingly, Cheesecake Factory wasn’t bad at putting together a decent plate of tacos. I expected something bland.