13 Cheesecake Factory Menu Items That Give You The Best Bang For Your Buck

If you're trying to find a place to eat that will satisfy the diverse cravings of a large group, The Cheesecake Factory is always a great choice. Its menu features over 250 items, and it has just about everything, including pasta, seafood, steak, sandwiches, salads, and of course — cheesecake! It also makes all of its meals from fresh ingredients, which is definitely a plus.

With so many menu items to choose from, deciding what to order may be difficult. If you're on a tight budget or are just trying to be more conscious of the money you spend, we've come up with a list of the best Cheesecake Factory menu items that will give you the most bang for your buck. We considered the price of each item, how much food is included in the order, the level of overall nutrients and calories, and the potential for splitting entrées into two separate meals. With this list, you'll be armed with a wide range of meals that should cover any type of flavor profile you happen to be in the mood for. Please note that prices may vary by location, and any references to calorie amounts are based on a 2,000-calorie daily diet.

The Cheeseburger Spring Rolls are under the "Small Plates & Snacks" section of the Cheesecake Factory menu. They're made with Certified Angus Beef, melted cheese, and grilled onions, and they come folded in crispy wrappers. The order comes with about six spring rolls, and in total it's about 990 calories. Since 990 calories is about half of the food that the average person would need on a 2,000-calorie daily diet, we can safely consider this a meal and not a snack.

You'll only pay $12.95 for this meal, as these spring rolls are one of the cheapest items on the entire menu. This is the same amount you'd pay for a McDonald's Quarter Pounder meal — but at McDonald's, you can't get the same dining experience as you would while enjoying your food at The Cheesecake Factory. Overall, this is a great option if you're craving some red meat and cheese at a sit-down meal but want to keep the price to a minimum.

Many people love to order an appetizer as their main dish, and The Cheesecake Factory definitely has a good variety to choose from, as it offers close to 25 options (depending on your location). If you're looking for an appetizer that will satisfy you in the same way a meal would, we recommend the Small Thai Lettuce Wraps with Chicken. This dish comes with a couple of satay chicken strips on a bed of lettuce, and it includes carrots, bean sprouts, coconut curry noodles, and three different sauces to help you fill out your wraps.

This dish is about 500 calories, which is a solid amount of energy for a meal. With the protein from the chicken, plus the carbohydrates from the veggies and noodles and a bit of fat from the nut-based sauces and garnish, you'll probably feel pretty satisfied after eating this plate. Also, it only costs $13.95, making it one of the cheapest meal options on the menu. Many customers absolutely love this dish, too, as there are tons of YouTube and TikTok videos of people devouring it — some of whom even claim that it's a majorly underrated menu item.

If you love pizza or, even more traditionally, flatbreads, we have good news for you. The Cheesecake Factory offers six different flatbread options, all of which are priced between $11.95 and $15.50. From least expensive to most expensive, the options are: Cheese, Margherita, Fresh Basil Tomato and Cheese, Pepperoni, The Everything (with sausage, peppers, pepperoni, onions, and mushrooms), and the Bee Sting (with Italian sausage, pepperoni, bacon, Calabrian chiles, mozzarella, vodka sauce, parmesan, and honey).

Not only is this a great array of flatbread options that can satisfy a variety of cravings you might have, but these flatbreads are also a great size. They're generally cut into eight square pieces and are very filling. The regular cheese pizza has 1,000 calories, while the Bee Sting has 1,170. Depending on your hunger level, you might even leave with some leftovers for another meal the next day. For the price range, this is a pretty great deal for the amount of food that you're getting. This is also a beloved dish for Cheesecake Factory fans, as tons of people have shared their mouthwatering flatbreads all over social media.

If you're heading to The Cheesecake Factory for lunch, you might get some deals that you won't be able to find at dinner time. One is Renee's Chicken Almond Salad Sandwich. This is a specific item that's only on the lunch menu, and it comes with a half salad and a cup of soup. This sandwich is made with chicken salad, tomatoes, and lettuce, and it's served on deli bread. You can then choose from Mexican chicken and tortilla soup, cream of chicken soup with artichoke hearts and mushrooms, or clam chowder. Lastly, it's served with a green salad, which you can upgrade to a Caesar salad for $1 extra.

This entire meal is priced at $16.95, which we think is a great value for all of the variety you're getting. Many popular grab-and-go lunch places, like DIG or Chopt, offer meals anywhere from $16 to $20. Knowing that you can get a nicer, sit-down meal that'll fill you up just as well for the same amount of money as a counter-service establishment makes this seem like an even better deal. It's also around 830 calories in total (depending on what soup you pick), which is a decent amount of calories for a lunch.

Another hidden gem on The Cheesecake Factory's lunch menu is its Chicken Piccata. This meal comes with sautéed chicken breasts covered in a creamy lemon sauce and topped with mushrooms and capers. The dish also comes with a serving of angel hair pasta, rounding out this meal to about 1,340 calories. If you're on a 2,000-calorie daily diet, that's about two thirds of your food for the entire day. Not only is this a large serving, but it only costs $17.95 if you order it before 5 p.m.

This same meal is also served after 5 p.m., but it costs $24.95 on the dinner menu. It's possible that this serving size is slightly bigger, as the dinner menu adds an extra 80 calories to the dish. We don't think that the extra $7 is worth a measly 80 calories, though, so if you want the most bang for your buck, save this meal for a lunchtime order at The Cheesecake Factory, and you'll most likely be able to save half of the meal for dinner that evening.

You might think the cheapest pasta dish on any menu will have a simple preparation with no sort of protein or nutritional add-ins to fill it out. Luckily, that's not the case at The Cheesecake Factory. The Tomato Basil Pasta is an incredibly hearty dish, and it's only priced at $19.95. It's made with penne pasta, grilled chicken, fresh mozzarella, garlic, and a tomato basil sauce.

This is a meal that covers all of the macronutrients (carbohydrates, protein, and fat) that we need in our diets daily, and the entire dish is 1,720 calories. In terms of a 2,000-calorie diet, that is a lot of calories (and most of what you would need in a day). That said, depending on how hungry you are, it would be more budget-friendly to use this meal as two separate meals. Enjoy half of the pasta dish while you're eating at The Cheesecake Factory, and save the other half for lunch the next day. That means that this delicious, restaurant-made order will cost you less than $10 per meal.

The Cheesecake Factory has about 12 seafood items on its menu, and we think the item that'll get you the best bang for you buck is the Jamaican Black Pepper Chicken and Shrimp. This entrée comes with a heaping serving of both sautéed chicken and shrimp that are smothered in a spicy Jamaican black pepper sauce. The dish also comes with rice, black beans, plantains, and marinated pineapple on the side. With so much variety on one plate, your taste buds definitely won't get bored.

This meal costs $24.95, and compared to the other dishes on the menu, it's a great deal. Not only is it among the cheaper items in the seafood category, but it also has the most variety. If you were to order just the shrimp version without chicken, you would pay the same amount. The chicken-only version costs $22.95. So, for just $2 more than the chicken dish, and for the same price as the shrimp dish, you can get a mixture of both. They all offer the same amount of food, but there's something much more satisfying about eating a variety of protein on your plate versus just one type. The meal is also 1,340 calories, so you could theoretically split it into two separate meals.

The smallest category on The Cheesecake Factory's menu is its "Factory Combinations," which features multiple entrée options that are paired together. Out of the three options on the menu, we think that the Steak Diane and Herb Crusted Salmon give you the most bang for your buck. This dish comes with a serving of Steak Diane, which is a steak medallion covered in a mushroom wine sauce, black peppercorns, and grilled onions. Then, there's a hefty serving of mashed potatoes that fills the middle of the plate. On the other side of the potatoes is a filet of herb-crusted salmon served atop some asparagus.

This combo meal only costs $28.95, which is pretty surprising when you see that the Steak Diane by itself also costs $28.95, and the Herb Crusted Salmon costs $27.95 on its own. You're essentially getting two meals for the price of one. The entire meal is about 1,730 calories, which (depending on your hunger level) is likely more than you can eat in one sitting. This is the best type of meal to eat half of before boxing up the other half for later.

If you're craving a delicious burger when you pull up to The Cheesecake Factory, you're in luck, because we think that its Old Fashioned Burger is one of the best bang-for-your-buck items the restaurant has to offer. Not only is it one of the cheapest dishes on the menu overall, but it also offers enough food to keep you satisfied. (If you don't live near a Cheesecake Factory, here's our list of the best burgers in the U.S.)

This burger is served on a toasted brioche bun and comes topped with lettuce, tomatoes, onion, pickles, and mayonnaise. It's also served with a generous helping of french fries. The burger itself is 990 calories, and the french fries add an additional 550, making this meal 1,540 calories in total. With the protein and fat from the burger, plus the carbohydrates from the bun and french fries, you have just about everything you need in a satisfying meal. This burger only costs $16.95, which is already a great price, but when you consider that you could easily split this into two meals, it gets even better. Each meal would theoretically cost you only $8.40, which, in our opinion, is a pretty good deal.

Salads can really be hit-or-miss. Sometimes they're fresh and filling, but other times they're less than tasty and still leave your stomach grumbling. Fortunately, we can confidently say that the Factory Chopped Salad from The Cheesecake Factory falls into the fresh-and-filling category. It's one of the cheapest salads on the menu, yet it features an abundance of ingredients that'll keep you fuller and more satisfied than many other menu items.

This salad is made with a romaine lettuce base and has chicken breast pieces, tomatoes, avocados, corn, bacon, blue cheese, apples, and a vinaigrette sauce. The best part? It only costs $16.95, while many other salads on the menu cost about $19.95. The Factory Chopped salad is 780 calories, which is decent, and it'll definitely give you the energy you need. Plus, the mixture of fruit, protein, veggies, and cheese covers all of your macronutrients, keeping you nice and satisfied.

On Saturdays and Sundays, The Cheesecake Factory offers a brunch menu. This menu offers many different sweet and savory options, and we all know how hard it can be to choose which one you're in the mood for. If you truly can't decide, we recommend the Fried Chicken & Waffles Benedict. This is a unique dish that has a large Belgian waffle on the bottom and crispy fried chicken strips on top, plus poached eggs, hollandaise sauce, and maple-butter syrup. Ultimately, this dish combines three separate dishes into one, making a delicious sweet-and-savory meal.

The Fried Chicken & Waffles Benedict only costs $18.95, which we think is a steal. For context, if you just ordered the regular Fried Chicken & Waffles meal, that would cost you $17.95. The Eggs Benedict meal is also $17.95, although this one does come with an English muffin and bacon. However, to get a mixture of the two meals and ultimately upgrade the chicken & waffles dish for only $1 more, this is definitely a great deal. In total, the meal is 1,670 calories, which is close to all of the food you'd need in a day on a 2,000-calorie diet. You could definitely box up half of this meal and save it, making the savings even better.

Another high-calorie, high-nutrient meal on The Cheesecake Factory's menu that has a fair price point is the Korean Fried Chicken. This meal comes with crispy fried chicken that's smothered in a spicy Korean barbecue sauce, and it's served over steamed rice, avocado, kimchi, mushrooms, cilantro, and sesame seeds. This flavor-bursting item is priced at $19.95, and for a specialty meal that offers such a large serving (and with such a wide variety of flavors), we think this is a solid deal.

This dish comes out to be about 1,810 calories, so many folks could easily split this into two servings. This will still leave you with a decent 905 calories per serving. Even better, it would only cost you about $10 per meal if you decided to split it up. This is a popular menu item at The Cheesecake Factory, especially for people who love a spicy kick in their food.

You simply can't go to The Cheesecake Factory if you don't get some cheesecake for dessert, right? On the menu, there are many slices of cheesecakes to choose from (and we've ranked eight of them worst to best). They range from plain cheesecake to specialty slices like Triple Berry Bliss, Oreo Dream, Chocolate, and more. These slices are priced between $9.95 and $10.95, but did you know that you could just order an entire 10-Inch Cheesecake instead?

You can order a full version of almost any of the restaurant's cheesecakes. A 10-inch cheesecake is usually cut into about 12 pieces. At the restaurant, you'll be charged about $64.95 for the original cheesecake, which brings that price to about $5.40 per slice. If you were to buy each slice individually, it would cost almost double that amount, at $9.95 per slice. We think that by buying the entire cake, you're getting the absolute best bang for your buck. This is a great option if you're dining with a large group of people. You could also opt to take the rest of the cake home and put it in the freezer, allowing you to enjoy this delicious dessert for many days after.

When deciding which menu items to place on this list, we considered a variety of factors. First, we looked at each category offered on The Cheesecake Factory menu, and we took a look at some of the cheapest options per category. From there, we noted which ones offered a large amount of food for the smaller price. We considered the ingredients that were included, the calorie count, and the price, all while comparing these factors to the menu's more expensive meals.

Ultimately, this list shares some of the cheapest options on the menu that will still satisfy the customer on a taste level as well as a calorie and nutrient level. These options will also save them some money if they split the large portion into two separate servings, providing a great deal compared to the menu at large.