This is a chain restaurant that is not located in Canada (other than Toronto), so I get very excited to eat here whenever we go to Anaheim. I believe we have now ate at the GardenWalk location on three of our four trips to SoCal…
The menu is gigantic – I believe they claim there are over 250 items on the menu and I wouldn’t be surprised if there actually was. They have just about anything you can think of, sandwiches, pasta, pizza, salads, etc.
They bring a basket of bread to start your meal. I didn’t take a picture of it this time, but it definitely had pumpernickel as one option – I think the other one was a more generic white or whole wheat. I like their bread – it’s really nothing special, but it’s always soft and honestly I just love bread haha.
For some reason, I keep ordering pasta whenever I go here. This trip was no different. I decided to try the Four Cheese Pasta with Chicken – penne pasta, mozzarella, ricotta, romano and parmesan cheese, marinara sauce and fresh basil $19.50
It’s quite dark in the restaurant, so I apologize for the shitty pictures. I enjoyed this, the penne was thinner than most which I actually prefer. The sauce was fairly standard, but I enjoyed it.
Luke has been on a huge Mule phase lately, so he ordered the Pineapple Moscow Mule – Stolichnaya, pineapple, ginger beer and lime, $11.95.
I just asked Luke to tell me his thoughts on this drink – he looked at me with a puzzled look and said “I ordered that?”. So – I’d say this drink was not memorable. I don’t remember him disliking it or saying it was gross, but it was nothing special (kind of the theme of this place haha).
For food, Luke does a much better job than I do of switching it up every time we eat here. On this trip, he went for the Truffle-Honey Chicken – fried chicken breast with truffle-honey, asparagus and mashed potatoes, $16.95.
The plating left a bit to be desired, it looked a little messy/off centre, but it tasted decent. The chicken was breaded nicely and was flakey. The honey was minimal, just enough to give it a nice sweet taste. The mashed potatoes and asparagus were good.
I can’t go to the Cheesecake Factory and not order cheesecake, even though Luke decided he didn’t want one this time. I only ate about half of my pasta in order to have room to enjoy cheesecake, and I ordered the Caramel Pecan Turtle – pecan brownie and caramel-fudge swirl cheesecake topped with Caramel Turtle pecans and chocolate, $7.95. I forgot to take a picture of this, but Luke and I shared it and enjoyed it – is there such a thing as bad cheesecake?
Our total bill came to $60.72. Overall, this restaurant is just standard, basic food but I really like it. Plus they have like 50 different cheesecakes to choose from, so that automatically makes them a winner in my books!