Cheesecake Factory’s Cajun salmon is having a TikTok moment. It’s bringing local crowds — and headaches.
How one woman’s customized Cheesecake Factory order spread to millions of viewers, including tennis star Coco Gauff. Meanwhile at the restaurant, the orders are straining the kitchen and servers.
Cheesecake Factory’s Cajun salmon used to be a straightforward order: blackened salmon, Creole sauce, buttered corn, mashed potatoes.
Then it hit TikTok earlier this month.
Now, in a social media-driven frenzy that’s spread nationwide, Cheesecake customers are swapping in loaded mashed potatoes, adding shrimp, ordering extra sauce, and turning a single entrée — one of the roughly 250 dishes on the chain’s menu — into a build-your-own production.
And in Philly, at least one local Cheesecake Factory is feeling the heat.
Spawning a Cajun salmon trend
The salmon craze can be traced to Sept. 3, when Shayla Roberts, a nail technician and permanent-makeup artist from Minneapolis, posted a 15-second video showing how she orders the Cajun salmon, opting for loaded mashed potatoes, shrimp on top, a pitcher of extra sauce, and a side of Cajun seasoning.
Roberts, who posts as @slayed_byshayyyy and has about 55,400 followers on Instagram and nearly 39,000 on TikTok, said she had no marketing plan behind the post. “I love to eat, and I feel like when I go to any restaurant, I’m always trying to jazz it up a little bit,” she told The Inquirer. “And so I thought, let me just start recording, because my mom and my aunts were saying, ‘You’re always adding a little razzle-dazzle to stuff. You need to start putting [it online].’”
Her recommendation quickly spread. On Sept. 7, tennis star Coco Gauff posted on TikTok from the U.S. Open in Queens, N.Y., to say that she wanted to try the dish because it kept appearing in her feed.
That got the attention of Cheesecake Factory, which replied to say it had a restaurant in Queens, near the tennis center.
Then on Sept. 11, food reviewer Keith Lee — who has 17.3 million followers on TikTok and 2.7 million on Instagram — stitched Roberts’ video on TikTok while sampling the dish at a Dallas-area Cheesecake Factory. Lee posted to Instagram three days later.
The dish’s popularity exploded from there. The original video eventually drew about 5 million views, while Lee’s posts generated millions more.
“Five million views of attention? I did not expect that,” Roberts said.
Over the weeks, the trend has spawned scores of follow-up videos, from customer reviews to workers documenting the rush. One food runner posted a video from a kitchen, proclaiming: “Out of the 10 dishes ready to go, six are the viral meal. TikTok, you done it again.”
Even people creating copycat dishes are getting thousands of views. Then on Thursday, Gauff posted again, this time eating the dish.
‘The thing that everyone’s ordering’
The sudden surfeit of modifications comes with a downside for local staff.
“When I ring it into the computer, there are probably 10 buttons I have to push to put it in the way people are asking for it,” said a server at the Cheesecake Factory’s Center City location, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak for the company.
“And all this extra special stuff is really easy for the kitchen to trip over when they’re making it a thousand different ways.”
The volume is apparently substantial. At that location, at 15th and Walnut Streets, the restaurant sold at least 60 orders of the Cajun salmon one night this week, according to the worker. In previous nights, servers would ring in just a few.
The Cajun salmon is priced at $19.95 at lunch and $29.95 at dinner, but the extras like shrimp can add more than $10.
For workers paid a tipped wage, bigger checks should translate into more money. But the server said that has not necessarily been the case. The trend has particularly attracted younger customers, some of whom seem surprised by the final tab and pull back sharply on tips, the server said: “Some tables will leave $5, no matter what the total is.”
The shortfall can average about $50 a night, said the server, who would prefer that management institute an automatic gratuity on all checks.
Cheesecake Factory declined to comment on the impact on workers, but welcomed the attention. “It’s been fun to see the creative ‘hacks’ that our guests are making to this dish as well as several other items across the menu,” chief marketing officer Donald Evans said in a statement.
By now, at the Center City location, some customers don’t even need to name the dish. “People are asking me to get them ‘the thing that everyone is ordering,’” the worker said. “I wonder what’s next.”
