cheesecake Archives - Curiously Carmen

Since these two weeks haven’t been exactly the best, I always find myself thinking about my weekend getaway as that was the highlight of my month. So, let us flashback to my weekend in Seattle 🙂

After spending a long day walking around downtown, we were pretty hungry and tired by the time dinner rolled around. Walking around burned all the energy from our lunch at PF Changs. We also witnessed a ridiculous man who was going absolutely crazy, swearing and yelling at workers because their computer broke and had to close the store early. I’ve never seen someone so upset over gelato before!

After that incident, we were walking to the Cheesecake Factory and out of nowhere, this minivan starts honking for two minutes straight, because the car in front of her was dropping off an older man at the sidewalk when the traffic light was red and there wasn’t anything saying they couldn’t stop. WTF?! This is not including the creepy man on drugs who yelled at me at See’s Chocolate hours before but I don’t want to get sidetracked anymore LOL. People are scary sometimes. Anyways, we got to the main Cheesecake Factory location in downtown and waited about twenty minutes in line which was expected for a gorgeous, warm Saturday night.

Maki and Nigiri ordered the seared tuna tataki to start ($17.95 USD). Since it was $18 for a thinly sliced portion, I felt bad having some so I don’t have an opinion on this dish 🙂 But any dish with avocado and seared tuna is good in my books.

For the entree, Maki and Nigiri shared a pasta dish, which I can not remember the name of. Sorry 🙁 The portion was huge though, you can’t really tell from the picture but it is definitely an entree meant for more than one person!
The boyfriend ordered the classic burger ($11.95 USD) which came with a big piece of grilled onion, lettuce, tomato, and a side of fries. I was quite surprised he ordered a plain hamburger, but he didn’t want to over indulge since we were planning on getting cheesecake! To his surprise, he really enjoyed the hamburger and said it was delicious even without the cheese. To this day, he still brings up this burger and wants to have it again, haha!
I ordered the fried shrimp platter ($16.95 USD). I love my seafood, especially shrimp, and this one was no different. The shrimp were absolutely massive, I’ve never had shrimp that big before!

They were very crispy and flavourful. The fries underneath were pretty standard, and I didn’t try the cole slaw because I’m not a big fan of it. None of us enjoyed the special shrimp dipping sauce (the red one in the back), it had a very off putting flavour and was a bit watery and light. I ended up only eating half my entree because I was getting pretty full from the huge shrimp pieces, and plus I wanted to save room for cheesecake (duh).
Finally, the best and most famous part came! Maki and Nigiri decided to split the mango key lime cheesecake (all their cheesecakes have a set price, from $6.95-$7.95 USD). Yummmm!!
The reason why the boyfriend decided to skip out on the cheese for his burger earlier was for this slice of rich, heavenly indulgence, the Godiva cheesecake. One bite was more than satisfying for me, we all found this cheesecake to be very, very heavy and filling even though he asked for no whip creme.

I can’t believe I’m saying this but we felt that there was almost too much of a chocolate taste (I know, impossible right?!). We didn’t really taste the actual cheesecake flavour, just lots and lots of chocolate. I think this would be a good dessert to split among four people, but definitely way too much for one person. Needless to say, he ended up packing half of it back to our hotel because it was impossible to finish.
For myself, I ordered the white chocolate raspberry truffle cheesecake (Oh man, I felt myself gaining a few pounds just typing that out LOL). I had asked for no whip, but they forgot about it so I ended up scooping it off. At first, we were wondering why my cheesecake crust was dark, and thought that maybe it got burnt since the other two looked fine? T

Turns out, my cheesecake came with a chocolate crust. I prefer the original crust cause I didn’t taste the chocolate at all, and it tasted a burnt to me. As for the cheesecake, it was pretty good and rich, but I was hoping that there would be more raspberry to it. Nonetheless, I did enjoy my slice and ended up bringing half of it back to the hotel as well. Of course, we didn’t end up eating both of them and had to throw them out since they melted in the car after outlet shopping. =.=”

All in all, I had a lovely experience as usual at the Cheesecake Factory and am already looking forward to the next visit! There was also some sort of homecoming prom thing for high schoolers that day, and it was very cute to see nervous preteens all dressed up and going on dates with each other 🙂

Andddd, here is a bonus picture of a gorgeous view in Seattle 🙂 Thanks for the great visit, see you next time Seattle ♥

-Carmen

Funny fact, I always thought this place was called Mario’s Gelato until I tried to Urbanspoon it, and there were no results! So I decided to add/suggest the restaurant to Urbanspoon, and it showed me that a place known as “Amato Gelato Cafe” was already at this location.

After some research, Amato Gelato Cafe is the retail gelato shop owned by Mario’s Gelato. We noticed that with our latest visit, our gelato pints came with their company logo on it, while previous times, there was nothing. Weird. Anyways, after our mediocre and semi-disappointing visit to Ramen Sanpachi, we were feeling like dessert so we stopped by here. Before writing this, I was reading up on other reviews from this place. A blogger mentioned that she got in trouble for taking pictures in the store, which didn’t happen to me. That’s very strange, especially in our day and age where a significant portion of a restaurant’s marketing comes from their own customers. Perhaps they changed their policy.

Speaking of policy, Amato does not accept credit cards. There is a charge to use debit, so cash is the way to go! You also pay for your ice cream prior to choosing the flavours. There are also two more gelato display cases which aren’t pictured, which forms a bit of a “J” shape.
Whenever we come here, we always get the “to go” tub because we feel that it’s a better value. For $9, you get a lot more ice cream and you can bring it home to enjoy! I believe you can chose from 1 L or 500 ml, we went with 500 ml.

You can also pick up to three flavours, which is what we usually do. It always takes me a long time to decide which flavour I want, and the staff are generally really patient with sampling.

However, I do find that they do not really know their products well, because when you ask them questions, they look really confused.
The first flavour we decided on getting that night was the rolo! It came with a caramel gelato base, with rolo chocolate chunks inside. We were hoping to get white chocolate raspberry, but they didn’t have that flavour that night so we settled with this.

There was a light caramel taste, nothing too strong. It was not as rich and sweet as I expected it to be for a gelato. The star of the show were the rolo chunks inside the ice cream, which had caramel inside!
The second flavour we got was the strawberry cheesecake. Please excuse my ugly pictures, it was tricky trying to capture it properly since it came in a pint! This one was my favourite out of the three flavours we got that night. It was very rich and indulgent, which is what I’m going for in gelato. There was a strong, thick, cheesecake flavour to it. It would have been nice to have included some actual strawberries in there, but I enjoyed the richness and creaminess to this gelato nonetheless.
The third flavour was the coconut, one of the boyfriend’s favourite! We order this flavour every time because it tastes so good and rich. There is a strong coconut taste to it, but also very, very rich and creamy. The coconut gelato has a very smoother texture to it, more so than the other flavours.

From what we’ve tried from our multiple visits, Amato offers decent gelato at a decent price. The flavours we tried had a smooth texture to it, and was very soft and nice to scoop.

-Carmen

The Cheesecake Factory, Downtown Seattle

Amato Gelato Cafe, Olympic Village