5 Well-Known Restaurant Chains That Make Their Food From Scratch

When food is prepared from scratch, you can really tell the difference in quality — and dare we say — the care that has been put into the meal. But outside of cooking in your own home, or eating out in some smaller, locally owned restaurants, most chains take shortcuts: Frozen items that get fried up straight out of the cooler, or pre-packaged, mass-produced, and microwaved meals that are as unappetizing as they sound (hey, how else can they make food so quickly — other than, you know, an assembly line). However, there are a few well-known restaurant chains that buck the status quo and have instead opted for scratch-made menu items from fresh ingredients.

Some of these restaurants might surprise you, while others have at least partially built their reputation on serving up freshly made meals. But rest assured, they all actually cook the ingredients found in their kitchens — and some of them actually bake their desserts from scratch, too. So if you’re out and about and you feel hunger pangs for freshly prepared food, consider dropping in on one of these five chains.

Starting off strong, with perhaps the biggest surprise on this list, pretty much everything at the Cheesecake Factory is entirely scratch-made. It might seem impossible, considering the size of the menu, which spans over 20 pages and covers more than 250 individual items, but it’s true. And it’s achieved by staffing an enormous number of people for the back-of-house (BOH) operations; in fact, with just over 200 locations in the U.S., and roughly 48,400 employees total, that averages about 225 employees per restaurant.

And there is a job for everyone, from first-comers to the kitchen, the prep cooks, to the sauce cooks, to the line cooks, all working together in an assembly line-like fashion, chopping lettuce, stretching dough for pizzas, slicing meats, grating cheeses, and so on. Which brings us to the cheesecakes. Ironically, the cheesecakes aren’t made in-restaurant, but they are scratch-prepared off-site and shipped frozen. This ensures consistency with the restaurants’ titular menu items, so that your Godiva Chocolate slice in Texas tastes exactly the same in Ohio.

There’s a reason In-N-Out Burger hasn’t hit the East Coast (not for lack of desire), and it’s because the chain takes freshness so seriously that there are no restaurants more than 300 miles from a distribution center, which is where its beef arrives from the farms to get processed and inspected. These buildings are also where the meat is ground up and formed into the burger patties, so In-N-Out has near-total control over the excellence of the final product, which gets shipped out fresh to restaurants and cooked up in a timely fashion.

The burger chain, which won’t use microwaves or freezers in any of its restaurants, places a high premium on the quality of its fresh ingredients beyond the meat, too. For example, the fries are hand-cut in-restaurant, made from potatoes that get delivered to the stores right from the farm suppliers, using a special slicer that makes itself known in the kitchen by its distinctive clanging noise (caused by the lever being slammed down to force the skinned potatoes through the blade grid). Then the pieces get fried up in 100% sunflower oil and make their way onto your tray — just a few short steps from vegetable to finished product.

If you’ve ever eaten at a Texas Roadhouse and found the food a step above what you’d normally expect from a casual steakhouse chain, it’s likely because much of the menu is actually made from scratch. Not only that, but the pride and joy of Texas Roadhouse — its steaks — are hand-cut by expert butchers inside coolers that stay well under the refrigeration standard of 40 degrees Fahrenheit, at 34 degrees.

But that’s just the beginning. Besides a few dressings, everything is made daily using fresh ingredients, including the side of green beans, which, along with the other produce, is sourced regionally at every possible instance. Every Texas Roadhouse also employs a baker to churn out the soft, fluffy bread rolls, which during service hours are baked every five minutes to ensure they arrive at your table hot, all the better to melt the scratch-made honey cinnamon butter.

Chipotle Mexican Grill made a name for itself with its huge portions and high-quality ingredients, and even if the size of your burrito bowl has shrunk in the last few years due to employee inconsistencies, at least the chain has doubled down on the latter part. It famously purports to use just 53 ingredients for everything on its menu, many of which are herbs and spices, and you won’t find a freezer, a microwave, or even a can opener on-site at any of Chipotle’s restaurants. Of course, scratch-made isn’t just what the ingredients are, but how they are put together and actually cooked, and in this case, assembled.

The cilantro-lime rice, for example, is made in batches using hot, fresh white or brown rice, which gets hand-mixed with cilantro, lime juice, and salt. The delectable tortilla chips are made from corn tortillas, cut and fried, then tossed with fresh lime juice and salt. And what differentiates Chipotle from all the other eateries on this list is that you can actually watch the veggies and chicken (which sits in its marinade for up to 24 hours) cook on the flat-top grill, and see before your very eyes how all the elements come together in your bowl or burrito.

Like In-N-Out and Chipotle, Five Guys doesn’t have freezers in any of its restaurants, because it places a huge emphasis on the freshness of its ingredients. For a burger chain, that obviously starts with its beef patties, which get formed by hand every day in the kitchens from ground meat that is only usable for up to three shifts (if there is any left after that time is up, it gets thrown away). It’s the same idea for the fresh vegetables that get prepped during the first shift, none of which arrive pre-sliced, and all of which must be cut by an employee. Because they are raw, uncooked veggies, there is also a relatively short time period during which they must be used, or they get tossed. Once items like the mushrooms and onions are chopped up, they go on the flat top grill to be cooked, by hand, by a Five Guys employee.

Five Guys’ buns were actually baked on-site when the chain was still picking up speed, but since the operation has grown to include almost 2,000 locations across the U.S., they have since contracted out. Rest assured, though, they are made from scratch at off-site bakeries, nearly every day of the week, using a proprietary recipe that you can’t find anywhere else. It’s definitely the more expensive option for Five Guys, but the decision-makers at the top of the company have long felt it was worth the extra cost.