KSL reported last week that Cheesecake Factory plans to open its first Utah County location, in Orem’s University Place, where Los Hermanos currently resides. While construction is set to begin immediately, no opening date has been announced.
Regardless, if eating at Cheesecake Factory is something you’re interested in doing, you’d better get in line now.
When I was a teen, a Krispy Kreme franchise was set to open in Orem. I’d never had a Krispy Kreme doughnut before but had heard good things. I have an intense fear of missing out and was convinced every other student would roll up to school with a steaming doughnut in hand on opening day. So I convinced my parents that we needed to arise before dawn, drive one city over, and get a free doughnut the minute the store opened its doors.
Bleary-eyed and disheveled we piled into our Ford Expedition at 5 a.m. and headed west to the Krispy Kreme. But about half a mile from our destination, we hit a line of stopped cars, inching forward every minute or so. We realized we had joined hundreds of other Utah County families who had piled into their respective vehicles even earlier than we had, hoping to get a hot, fried, glazed confection before the sun rose over Mount Timpanogos. We spotted a Krispy Kreme employee wearing a green apron and looking overwhelmed handing out paper hats to drivers and passengers. When he finally made it to our car, he told us the wait for doughnuts was two hours.
As hard as my siblings and I tried to convince my parents we didn’t actually need to attend school that morning, they decided to cut our losses and drive home doughnutless, to our absolute devastation.
A few weeks later the fervor had died down and we were able to get a box of doughnuts after only 30 minutes of waiting. They were tasty, sure, but not wait-two-hours tasty. Very few things are wait-two-hours tasty, after all.
More recently, Raising Cane’s opened a location in South Jordan. There was some buzz online, so my husband and I corralled the kids into the car and, like my parents before me, headed west to try the hottest new chain to grace Utah with a location. And, just like that fateful morning decades prior, before Raising Cane’s was even visible, we hit a line of stopped cars a good mile from the drive-thru.
I’d learned my lesson from the Krispy Kreme incident, so we left the line soon after joining it. But I felt a little pang of sadness as we did. Not because I thought I was missing any sort of spectacular culinary delight — a chicken finger is a chicken finger — but because there was a sense of camaraderie in that line. A unity and excitement among all those waiting hours for their chicken, Texas toast and crinkle-cut fries.
A psychologist might tell you that these long lines speak to our collective desire for relevancy in what some might call a fly-over state. That we feel cool and important when a Shake Shack or Dunkin’ opens in our hometown, which is exciting, because we aren’t made to feel cool and important often enough.
But I don’t think it’s that deep. I think it’s just really fun and exciting when new places open up, especially when those new places are beloved by people in other parts of the country. It’s almost patriotic to enjoy new chains that are exported from other regions of our nation. Like going to Epcot and trying all the foods from around the world.
If the lines on every new chain’s opening day are any indication, every other human in this state shares my intense fear of missing out, and what we fear we’re missing out on is not a doughnut or a plate of chicken fingers or a slice of cheesecake, but an event! A celebration! A party that everyone else is attending!
So when the Cheesecake Factory does open its doors in Utah County, the wait for a table is sure to be long. And a good time.