I believe I’ve heard it described as an Italian restaurant for people who hate Italian food.
They’re bad. Very popular on the west coast for some reason. I guess because pasta is so expensive and difficult to cook at home? I don’t know. People seem to like their complimentary bread sticks a lot.
Basically, everything they serve is swimming in oil.
Don’t think they’re any less common in the northeast than anywhere else.
I used to dislike them in the 90s, but my wife and I have grown to love the place the last few years.
Here’s why:
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Their house salad is excellent. You can go there most of the year and get unlimited soup and salad, or sometimes soup OR salad. If the current deal is soup OR salad, I always get the salad and my wife always gets the Chicken Gnocchi soup. But I can’t get enough of their salad. Just olive oil and vinegar as dressing, excellent fresh vegetables blended together to taste great. I usually can get filled up just in one serving, but if I’m feeling really hungry, it’s bottomless, I can get more salad.
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As mentioned above, the Chicken Gnocchi soup is really nice. It’s a little heavy for me, but if I’m having soup and salad, it provides a nice creamy contrast with the salad.
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This might be YMMV, but we’ve always had really nice servers at Olive Garden. Usually young people who are masters at engaging you in light conversation from time to time. I have no idea if they just get lucky, but it’s happened so often to us at various Olive Gardens that we think they must train their staff how to be super friendly and engage in light, fun, banter. I’ve never been to any other restaurant where this is the case.
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I’ve not tried their various pasta dishes much. Once or twice I’ve given it a try, since they had great deals going, but I can’t resist just filling up on the house salad instead. But I’m not a fan of pasta in general, so maybe I’m a bad judge of whether or not the pasta dishes are worth it. But from my perspective, who goes to Olive Garden for the pasta when they usually have unlimited soup and salad for so cheap?
I’ve never seen one in New York or Massachusetts.
There are a bunch of them in both states. They’re all over the place. From looking at google maps, looks like there are around 20 of them in eastern Mass… Hell there are 7 of them on Long Island.
You know, now that I think of it, their salad is pretty good. I haven’t been to an Olive Garden in 10 years, but it’s probably the only thing I remember being pleasant about the experience.
But I can’t really see myself going to Olive Garden for salad though.
I picked up one of the pasta passes the first year they ran the promotion and it was a lot better deal then – soup or salad was included and you could order it to go (which I usually did) – but I haven’t been to an Olive Garden since and have no desire to. The pasta itself was unremarkable and the sauces you could choose from were either overly sweet or overly salty. As mentioned the servers were always extremely nice though (it probably helped that I tipped even on take out, and I was there a lot) and the salad and gnocchi soup were the best thing I ordered most days.
Agreed on the servers. They’re all typically nice people. I don’t fault the servers for the Sysco reheated stuff that Olive Garden serves.
The soup and salad meal is a good deal for lunch. Nothing really wrong with either, although they do tend to over-salt their soups. Their pasta is terrible though. You can make better pasta at home for a pittance, and that’s while using store-bought sauces.
The bread sticks that everyone loves just taste like doughy butter, which probably account for their popularity.
I love the soup/salad/breadsticks lunch. Good price, salad is fresh and tasty, and the soups are hearty.
Their pasta though… at an Italian restaurant… is… really bad.
Overcooked and underseasoned.
They don’t serve pasta correctly (al dente) because people send it back. There was a document leaked from their restaurant group about how to improve Olive Garden’s flagging sales, and it was discovered that they didn’t salt the water they boil pasta in… to save wear and tear on the pots and pans.
Pasta cooked without salt.
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Italian food, that you pay for.
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Hundreds of thousands of Italian cooks began spinning in their graves when that fact got out.
To be precise, it was a presentation by an activist shareholder in the restaurant group.
Personally I can’t imagine soup and salad as being reason enough to go to a particular restaurant, but de gustibus.
It wasn’t leaked. It was openly published for the public to see.
The Starboard Value hedge fund wanted to embarrass the board of Darden Restaurants, the firm that owns Olive Garden, so they could take over the chain.
The idea of not using salt in cooking because it would damage pots and pans is… crazy town.
I mean, who even THINKS of that kind of thing? I have literally never even considered the potential damage to cooking utensils from salt.
I mean, I guess it would have some minute effect? After like, a hundred years? Maybe? But it’s like, “We don’t want to cook, because cooking adds to wear and tear on the equipment that we specifically bought for cooking.”
It’s just such a weird thing to even have go through your mind. Not only because it’s obvious that you need to salt water that cooks pasta, but because who links about the wear and tear on a metal pot due to the trivial acidity caused by salt water?
Obviously, managers of large restaurant chains.
It’s just so weird.
Even on the scale we’re talking… How much money could that possible translate into over the course of a year, over all the restaurants? A penny?
Like, just from a purely scientific perspective, the difference between boiling water, and boiling salt water in a pot. How much could that possibly change the lifetime of the pot?
The only way it could do anything is if you like… didn’t wash the pots for long periods of time and just left salt water sitting in them or something. It’s bizarre.
Honestly, stirring something in a pot probably does more structural damage to the pot than anything you’d cook in it and that amount of damage could only really be measured in decades of observation.
Oh yeah, I forgot one other thing me and my wife enjoy as frugal patrons of eating Soup & Salad regularly at Olive Garden. After you’re done with dinner, the servers will gladly box up your remaining soup and salad to take home. Which means you can both have lunch the next day on the leftovers. So for less than $20, you’ve had dinner for 2, and then lunch for 2 the next day. It gives us a nice evening out with nice atmosphere too.
No doubt. But I’ve still never seen one.
They aren’t terrible. I just think on the west coast you don’t necessarily grow up with that nice Italian joint down the street. I know I can get better food at a few places here in town, but Olive Garden is consistent and offers decent quality and good quantity at a reasonable price. It is also a place you can take kids to.
Also, expensive Italian is kinda like expensive Chinese or Mexican food. It is usually better but very few people are really willing to pay extra for it.
PS…The Olive Garden a few miles from my house literally has people in line for tables by 5pm every night.
Fortunately around my area the cheap Mexican food is pretty good…