Cheesecake Factory Is Opening Its First New York Location This Year

Cheesecake Factory is finally opening in New York City. The popular suburban mall chain restaurant — which uniquely makes all of its food on-site at 200-plus locations — will be opening in the Queens Center mall in Elmhurst, according to a report from Queens Courier. A preliminary plan says the restaurant will have room for about 180 patrons indoors and nearly 50 in an outdoor patio, replacing a Children's Place and a Verizon store. The chain anticipates the location will open at the end of 2016.

The company first started back in the 1940s as a cheesecake bakery and eventually opened in its current form in 1978 in Beverly Hills, California. It now has more than 200 locations across the country, many of them behemoth spaces connected to suburban malls. The closest location to New York City is in Long Island. Besides more than 50 kinds of cheesecake, the menu is notoriously large, with more than 250 items ranging from pasta and pizza to Vietnamese spring rolls.