Robert Okura: having his cake while baking and eating it, too, at The Cheesecake Factory

Nation's Restaurant News, Jan 27, 2003 by Dina Berta

Sometimes being a good chef means breaking the rules.

Robert Okura, vice president of culinary development and corporate executive chef at The Cheesecake Factory Inc., was instrumental in standardizing recipes and writing cooking guidelines so that the cooks, who number more than a dozen in each restaurant, all can reproduce any of the more than 200 menu items to consistent perfection.

But Okura, who helped strengthen the order and structure in the kitchens of the Calabasas Hills, Calif.-based chain, confesses that his love affair with food drove him to buck the system at an early age.

When he was about 8 or 9 years old, he pocketed his allowance and left the house without telling his mother where he was going. He was determined to discover what was behind the wonderful smells wafting from the tiny red and white Italian deli shop in his Los Angeles neighborhood.

"I did something bad," he says, laughing at the memory. "I snuck out of the house and rode my bike on a busy street to this sandwich shop. I wasn't tall enough to reach the window. The guy at the counter looked tough. He had five o'clock shadow, a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve, but lucky for me, he had a kind heart. He said, 'Let me give you my specialty.' It was an Italian roast-beef sandwich with peppers and onions on a rustic Italian roll. I gave him all of my allowance. I'm not sure if it was enough, but he let me have the sandwich. I took a bite. Oh, my gosh!"

It wasn't enough to make Okura forsake his childhood favorites of hamburgers and hot dogs, but he did realize that there was much more out there. By age 12 he was cooking meals for his family, asking his mother to bring home special ingredients, such as red wine.

In high school he joined his friends at the local drive-in, but he also would sneak off to Greek cafes and Chinese restaurants. Cooking was a hobby for years until finally he was receiving so much praise and encouragement from friends and coworkers that he decided to make it a career and studied two years under chef Gregoire LeBalch in Los Angeles at Chef Gregoire restaurant.

Fifteen years ago he became a kitchen manager at The Cheesecake Factory's Marina Del Ray, Calif., store, eventually working his way up to corporate executive chef and vice president of culinary development.

It is fitting, somehow, that the adventurous Okura would grow up to become a culinary leader at The Cheesecake Factory, a company that has been breaking rules and conventional restaurant theories for the past 25 years.

The Cheesecake Factory, founded by chairman and chief executive officer David Overton, turned casual dining on its head when it began offering fine-dining-quality food for a casual-dinnerhouse price.

The Cheesecake Factory has a menu that exceeds 30 pages, listing some 200 items, including nearly two dozen appetizers, 10 pizzas, several burgers and dozens of chicken dishes, seafood selections, steaks, chops, ribs, signature cocktails, omelets and, of course, some 30 varieties of the namesake cheesecake.

All the dishes are prepared on premises except for the cheesecake. The portions are large, yet the check average is around $15 a person. But the stores do such high volume that annual sales per unit range between $10 million and $12 million a year.

Credit The Cheesecake Factory with inspiring restaurants to improve their level of service and food quality, says Robert Sturm, corporate chef for Custom Foods, a Chicago-area supplier to Cheesecake and other restaurants.

"The Cheesecake [Factory] is the gold standard in the chain business," he says.

The Cheesecake Factory has 59 units in 21 states. It did $474 million in systemwide sales in 2001, opened 10 stores in 2002 and expects to open 14 this year. The company also owns three Grand Lux Cafes, a more upscale concept that debuted in 1999 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.

"I have COOs and CEOs come up to me to tell me how much Cheesecake has done for the industry," Overton says. "Our success is based on quality and food, not gimmicks and price. We put out quality food within the constraints of casual dining and price points. Bob's efforts and the company's efforts have been appreciated for those very reasons. Most people didn't think we'd get this far. They thought we'd implode."

The Cheesecake Factory always has been a challenging assignment, Okura says.

He visited the restaurant after a friend suggested he might like to work there. Okura's lasting first impression of the Marina Del Ray store is that he couldn't even see the tiled floor for the crowd of people waiting for a table.

The crowd didn't intimidate him. As a chef at the MGM Grand Hotel in the Reno, Nev., area, Okura was accustomed to high volume. What intrigued him was the fact that a single restaurant attracted such a high volume with its menu, Okura says.

"The real hook for me, as a chef, was as busy as they were, they were way ahead of their time with their menu," he remembers. "They were doing Thai noodle dishes even though no one was familiar with those flavors. They were importing things I'd never heard of."