9 Restaurant Chains That Serve Mac And Cheese Made From Scratch

It is universally acknowledged that macaroni and cheese is one of the best comfort foods. It's everything an indulgence ought to be, where almost all of the guilty pleasure, shouldn't-but-should food groups that please the senses and the brain are well represented. It's a relatively simple construction of starchy and soft noodles with salty, creamy, gooey cheese sauce. A classic high-low food, most iterations of macaroni and cheese can't miss, from the cheap and easy Kraft pantry staple to the exquisitely prepared high-end restaurant style, and the often pretty good fast food stuff in between.

Mac and cheese is so wildly popular with most every age group and every demographic, besides the lactose- and/or gluten-intolerant, that restaurants of all kinds won't go broke putting it on the menu. But not all restaurant chain mac and cheese dishes are the same. Some use the kind of stuff one can buy at a grocery store, others microwave a supply sent from corporate headquarters, while even more give mac and cheese its due. A handful of well-known chain restaurants make macaroni and cheese from scratch, with just-boiled noodles and homemade sauces with a proper roux and cheese blend. These places rarely make the mistakes that can ruin mac and cheese, and they're the ones to seek out if you want scratch-made mac and cheese but don't want to make it yourself.

It's right there in the name: Beecher's Handmade Cheese is an artisan cheese maker first and foremost. Unlike the other restaurants that serve mac and cheese among the many other offerings, Beecher's Handmade Cheese only dabbles in the dish, serving it at a flagship location in Seattle's historic Pike Place Market and at three other cafés in the metropolitan area plus a few smaller, airport-size locales across the U.S. The company has been exceptionally and phenomenally successful at the side gig built around the venerable side dish. The routinely award-winning Beecher's uses its mac and cheese to showcase and celebrate its remarkably well-crafted and long-aged dairy products.

Beecher's offers six varieties of mac and cheese across its restaurants, which it makes available for grocery freezer sections, too. The "World's Best" Mac & Cheese, Smoked Flagship Mac & Cheese, Hatch Chile Mac & Cheese, Mariachi Mac & Cheese, Broccoli Mac & Cheese, and Gluten Free Mac & Cheese all use the same recipe. The not-so-secret ingredient in the scratch preparation is Beecher's proprietary cheddar, which one would need if they were to ever re-create or rip-off the dish. The cheese and restaurant company is so confident in what it does that it publishes the real recipe for the "World's Best" Mac & Cheese on its website. To do it like Beecher's does, use penne pasta, four parts Beecher's Flagship cheese to one part Beecher's Just Jack cheese, milk, flour, unsalted butter, kosher salt, garlic powder, and chili powder.

America will never give up on its steakhouses, be it high-end destination eateries or family-friendly chain establishments like Texas Roadhouse. In 2025 the restaurant became number one in sales among casual dining eateries in the United States, perhaps in part because of the home-cooked feel of its menu items. Texas Roadhouse leads off its website with a statement about how it prepares its menu items — including bacon bits, croutons, and other condiments — from scratch. That includes its mac and cheese.

That side dish (and kids' menu entree) isn't without controversy. Previously contending for a spot on the list of the worst items on the Texas Roadhouse menu, the mac and cheese went negatively viral in early 2023 after a customer's TikTok exposé revealed that the kind served up by the chain wasn't worth the $4 price tag because it was just a cup of what was clearly Kraft Macaroni and Cheese prepared to the box's specifications. After that, Texas Roadhouse committed to making its mac and cheese the old-fashioned way and in line with its mission statement, adding a thick and porous cheese sauce to freshly made jumbo elbow macaroni. While it took a while for every location in the Texas Roadhouse network to get on board and ditch the Kraft for the genuine product, the chain is on the record as a real-mac-and-cheese place.

One of the best steakhouse chains in the U.S. is actually a division of Darden, the restaurant ownership group best known for running Olive Garden. And yet The Capital Grille doesn't rely on time-saving ideas and quick fixes like its Italian-inspired counterpart. The fine dining establishment claims on its website to "use only the finest, freshest ingredients, masterfully prepared in recipes designed to engage all of your senses." That strongly implies that The Capital Grille goes scratch made whenever it can, and that would include the hefty, "for the table" crowd-pleaser of a side dish, "Lobster Mac 'n' Cheese."

Promising campanelle pasta that's been prepared al dente, meaning just barely softened and so not precooked elsewhere, The Capital Grille utilizes a total of six cheeses in its sauce that highlights the delicate lobster chunks. Mixed in with the noodles are mascarpone, Havarti, Parmesan, and cream cheese. As it bakes to completion, this mac and cheese from an upper crust establishment gets an upper crust consisting of white cheddar and Grana Padano, a hard, Parmesan-like Italian cheese.

One thing that you should know before eating at The Cheesecake Factory: Its towering cheesecakes for which the chain is so proud that it put them in the business name aren't made from scratch or on the premises of its more than 200 locations around the United States. While that's a little disappointing, it's downright impressive to the point of tough to believe that The Cheesecake Factory is a chain of factories of other foods because it makes all 250-plus items on its famously lengthy menu in a homemade fashion. Everything is scratch created or made to order at The Cheesecake Factory, including macaroni and cheese in its many forms.

The Fried Macaroni and Cheese look like it would be stored in a freezer with a few heated up at a time when ordered. But these giant spheres of mac and cheese that have been covered in crispy breadcrumbs and served with marinara are made fresh, as are the ones that go on top of the Macaroni and Cheese Burger and the standalone entree or side dish of mac and cheese.

Throughout its website, Modern Market Eatery goes out of its way to explicitly state that the items on its long menu, from salads to curries to pizzas to sandwiches, are scratch-made out of real, unadulterated foods like fresh poultry and produce. Even the sauces and dressings are made by hand with whole foods. That includes the macaroni and cheese, which is served as a side dish but is hearty enough to eat like a meal.

Modern Market Eatery clearly put a lot of work into its macaroni and cheese because its website once included a long description of the history and planning of the item. "We knew when creating Modern Market's macaroni and cheese we were up against every beloved childhood version out there," the copy read. Setting out to make an iteration that would exceed expectations, the chain broke down mac and cheese to its basic components and sought to improve them all. It utilized cavatappi noodles, a pasta with spiraling twists that trap and hold a lot of cheese. That cheese, or rather sauce, starts with the three-cheese blend Modern Market Eatery uses on its pizzas — Parmesan, Asiago, and mozzarella — and is bolstered by the addition of Muenster and white cheddar.

There are presently only seven Yardbird locations, but they're far flung enough to serve a wide audience to well-populated and tourist-heavy areas: Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Dallas, Washington, D.C., and Singapore. However, it's a small enough operation that it can maintain excellence chain-wide and adhere to the restaurant's statement of using what its website proclaims are beloved recipes passed down to the restaurant to prepare Southern-leaning dishes such as fried chicken, pecan cinnamon rolls, biscuits, and, of course, macaroni and cheese.

Gracing the menu in different forms as a side and a Yardbird Classic entree, Yardbird serves a standard, noodles-and-sauce mac and cheese and also a full lobster-adorned mac and cheese (which is so loaded that its cost changes with the market rates for that coveted shellfish). Both options are built on the same idea. Yardbird ditched macaroni noodles in favor of spiral-style pasta, and after cooking, it adds a cream-based blend of five different cheeses. A crispy, herb-infused crust tops both macs.

Back in the age of downtown shopping districts and its successor, the similarly disappearing shopping malls, department stores were sprawling affairs that offered all kinds of goods. It was fairly standard that such mega-stores also had small restaurants on the premises. Nordstrom, a high-end department store survivor, still numbers in the hundreds, and 188 of its stores around the U.S. (as of November 2025) operate eateries, of which 13 are cafés called the Nordstrom Bistro. The elegant, understated restaurants serve simple breakfast and lunch food of elevated quality (and price), such as steak and eggs, fruit bowls, paninis, and Angus burgers.

While the format may vary in terms of fanciness level, this glorified lunch counter surprisingly makes many of its items from scratch. That includes the macaroni and cheese. Sometimes made with crab, the recipe consists of cooked pasta swimming in a sauce concocted from warm heavy cream and a couple ounces of house-made Asiago cheese sauce.

What makes a good steakhouse into a great steakhouse? Its side dishes. Often big, shareable, and loaded with decadent and delectable dairy products, steakhouse sides like mashed potatoes, creamed spinach, and house-made macaroni and cheese can get passed around the whole table and delight everyone because they pair so well with a big, juicy steak. Mac and cheese in particular offers a creamy counterpoint to the bold and meaty taste of beef.

But not every steakhouse's mac and cheese is worthy of plate placement alongside its expensive cuts of high-end meat. Ruth's Chris Steak House is up to the task, offering two options from its sides menu: a standard mac and cheese and a lobster mac and cheese. Rather than the usual elbow noodles, Ruth's Chris Steak House uses in both the slightly larger and similarly shaped cavatappi pasta as well as a white cheddar cheese sauce (and Maine lobster in one). That sauce is made from a special blend of three cheeses of the restaurant's own design and creation.

At its network of 14 high-end steakhouses in major American and Asian cities, Smith and Wollensky offers a truffled mac and cheese as a side dish to go with its select cuts of beef. Served in individual cast-iron skillets, the recipe that Smith and Wollensky uses is widely published around the internet, indicating that what the steakhouse serves is the real deal.

The cheese for the dish used by Smith and Wollensky begins with a roux made from a hefty portion of butter, along with finely minced garlic and onion, cream, some flour, and a splash of reduced chicken stock. That makes a thick sauce. Into that goes almost equal parts of four kinds of grated cheese: Parmesan, provolone, cheddar, and Monterey Jack. Along with a bit of truffle salt and truffle oil added in late, the mac and cheese gets a treatment of panko-style breadcrumbs to form a crunchy and thick top coat when the portion is baked just before serving.