Cheesecake Factory - Redondo Beach, CA
Appearance(8): The Nachos get top points for presentation. The scoops of sour cream, pico de gallo and guacamole are nicely placed uniformly in the middle of the plate. The chips are spread around in a way that it would be easy to grab any of them without having to dig through any toppings. The cheese melted on most of the chips on top looked rather inviting and so did the shredded chicken. I did see quite too many chips on the bottom that looked dry, which is not good.
Quality of Ingredients(8): The guacamole was composed of onion, cilantro, tomato and huge chunks of avocado, which all tasted fresh. The pico de gallo included the typical tomato onion and green peppers, which were al fresh but nothing special. The chicken was marinated with a citric marinated and had a decent taste to it, nothing to rave about. There were two types of cheeses, jack and Velveeta, which tasted fresh enough, but the consistency (which I’ll get too) was not at all appealing. The chips had a good corn taste to them and didn’t get soggy at all, but this was mostly due for the lack of cheese on them.
Distribution of Toppings(4): The guacamole had huge chunks of avocado. They were so thick you couldn’t cut through them with a chip and, unless you used a knife and fork, you would end up trying to balance a huge piece of avocado on your chip. This caused all the guacamole to disappear rather quickly. The cheese was congealed as soon as the plate hit my table. Whichever chips had cheese from the beginning were the only ones that would get any and every other chip was destined to be dry. Any surrounding chips that were even brushing against the cheese would get stuck together, causing you to lift about 7 chips up when you were really trying to only grab one. The cheese was as thick as the avocado, and again, too thick for a chip to slice thorugh. The pico de gallo and sour cream were only enough for a all chips if you only dipped about ¼ of each chip. The chicken was scarce, there were only about 7 jalapeños and about five grains of corn thrown in for no good reason.
Price(4): I admit that this particular location had some nice views due it being near the marina, which sadly was not enough to make up for the $10 price tag. The ingredients were fresh, but there weren’t nearly enough toppings to cover all the chips. Our waitress came by maybe twice, and one of those times was to bring a bottle of Tabasco sauce I asked for, as that’s the closest thing they had to any type of salsa.
Overall(24/40): I don’t mind paying for atmosphere sometimes if the Nachos are good, but these Nachos were a pain to eat. I had to struggle to separate all the chips every time I was trying to grab just one, and in the end I had way too many dry chips due to the lack of toppings.
-iwst99
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