Beloved Location Closes After 34 Years

I’m in my car thinking deeply about crust.

I’m thinking about the different meanings the word holds, from the Earth’s crust to the crust on a loaf of bread to the crust you need to scrape off the bottom of a pot after overcooking your mac and cheese.

And there’s pastry crust: The compressed, fragile cradle to a creamy filling is always a delight; browned, crumbly bits fall off your fork as you bring a bite to your mouth.

It’s Jan. 24 and I’m driving to a Cheesecake Factory in Washington, D.C.’s Friendship Heights neighborhood hours before a snowstorm the news is calling “catastrophic” is supposed to start.

I feel hurried by the weather and also by the fact that this is the very last time I can go to this Cheesecake Factory, as it is closing after 34 years.

“After extensive review and analysis, the company made the difficult decision to discontinue operation of the restaurant,” a Cheesecake Factory representative tells TODAY.com, adding that most staff members have been transferred to other restaurants in the area.

If you’re wondering what happens to all that uneaten cheesecake and quirky decor, the rep says “some leftover slices” went home with staff members, and whole cheesecakes, like its employees, were transferred to the other restaurants in the area, along with chairs, tables and other fixtures.

This location was the fifth one to ever open and the first to open outside of California, the state where the chain was founded.

The word “crust” comes from the Latin word “crusta,” meaning “rind” or “shell,” which just makes me think of how empty this restaurant is now — a shell of its former self.

I’m not sure what I was expecting when I entered the Cheesecake Factory on its funeral day. Balloons? A banner reading “Bon Voyage, Friendship Heights!”? A conga line with folks eating cubes of cheesecake on toothpicks? The truth was much more mundane.

Our dinner was mostly like any other inside a moderately trafficked restaurant on the weekend.

“I have cousins that worked here. My cousin, she was a manager,” says Amanda Peralta, a Cheesecake Factory server, tells me. “My other cousin, she was a bartender/server, and then my aunt even worked here too. They got me the job, they were like, ‘Oh my God, you should come and join us.’ I did, and I’m the last one here.”

Peralta has been working here for four years, and this is her last shift before she moves to a restaurant in Virginia.

“Even in these days that we’re closing, there’s been a whole bunch of people saying, ‘Oh my God, I used to come here all the time,” she says. “They were like, ‘I was here when the doors first opened.’ They would say that there was a line out there. There would be a two-hour wait time and everyone would come here.”

The popularity of this particular location was apparent on social media when the news broke.

“Woooooow! End of an era for sure,” wrote one commenter.

“I think everyone in the DC area has been there on a date,” wrote another.

Some shared their fond memories of the eatery.

“My mom introduced me to my future stepdad at that Cheesecake Factory when I was five,” wrote one Instagram user. “I said, ‘I always wanted a Daddy.’ He melted, and our Daddy-Daughter relationship was born that day … Nearly 30 years later, he’s nearing the end of his life and doesn’t remember me, but I remember that moment at the Cheesecake Factory for both of us. It changed the trajectory of my life.”

“I had not visited here in many years but I had to say goodbye to a place that brought me so many happy times on Wisconsin Avenue,” wrote one Yelp reviewer.

When Matt Jones, an urban planner and D.C. resident, heard the news of its closing, it was a “gut punch,” he tells TODAY.com.

“The novelty of flipping through the pages of the never-ending menu was fun,” he says, adding that he feels sorry for area teens who won’t get to make similar memories. “You felt like you were part of the cool kids dining there.”

Growing up, this neighborhood was the height of luxury for many of us; the Cheesecake Factory’s neighbors included Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany and Co. and Lord and Taylor.

Our teen brains conflated Cheesecake Factory — the only place we could afford to enter — with wealth. And with 36 flavors of cheesecake within our grasp, we were wealthy. We were the upper crust.