Things you should never, under any circumstances, ingest but are technically food

Great read.

Its product is nominally pasta and wine, but what Olive Garden is actually selling is Olive Garden, a room of comfort and familiarity, a place to return to over and over.

In that way, it’s just like any other chain restaurant. For any individual mid-range restaurant, return customers have always been an easy majority of the clientele, and chain-wide, it’s overwhelmingly the case: If you’ve been to one Olive Garden, odds are very high you’ve been to two or more. If the restaurant is doing it right, though, all the Olive Gardens of your life will blur together into one Olive Garden, one host stand, one bar, one catacomb of dining alcoves warmly decorated in Toscana-lite. Each Olive Garden is a little bit different, but their souls are all the same.

All the stunts and menu revamps and dining room redesigns are met by diners with indifference at best, and outright hostility at worst. Inevitably Darden retreats and regroups, falling back on the only thing that ever reliably gets people in the door: pasta, a lot of it, cheaply, with soup and salad and breadsticks, and a vague veneer of Italy.

This is the fundamental truth of Olive Garden.

Yeah, I’m not a fan of olives either. I should probably try more but, bleurgh.

This bit makes it sound like part-chain-restaurant, part-eldritch-horror.

My wife has a theory that in any given pairing of significant others, you will not find an equal love for olives. Either one person loves them and one person hates them, or one person loves them and one person is neutral, or one person hates them and one person is neutral. It’s been true of everyone we’ve come across so far, so I’m curious if anyone here can disprove the theory.

I’m not sure I disprove it. I like olives on about a 3.5/5 level. I enjoy some, not all. My GF is at about a 5/5 on that same scale. Based on your comment though I was trying to think of another polarizing food and I’m drawing a blank. Olives are strange like that.

My girlfriend and I have no love for them if that’s good enough!

Black or green. Kalamata. Whatever. I love olives. I have literally eaten a whole jar of them in one sitting. I always ask for more olives if I get a drink that comes garnished with an olive.

My wife hates them.

My wife loves olives, I hate them. She doesn’t mind since she always gets mine.

I like the canned, sliced black olives, and that’s pretty much it. My wife loves all kinds of them, getting them from the olive bar at the fancy grocery store.

There was a health food store near me once upon a time that sold what they called “hangover olives.” Giant green olives stuffed with garlic, jalapeno, and anchovies. I loved them. Very tasty, extremely potent.

I think the idea was to alleviate your hangover by keeping other people far away.

QFT…

ITT crazy people.

What Rich said. Olives are delicious!

I will throw my support to the pro-olivites.
Olives are full of salt.
Salt is what flavor is made from.

They’re also full of fat. The other thing flavor is made from!

Mmmm… salty fat.
They’re like bacon fruit.

I think I just saw how to market olives to the heretofore disinterested American market.

Holy shit. You’re right.

BRB cracking open a container of kalamatas. This also reminds me that I have to buy more blue cheese stuffed martini olives.

I recommend Castelvetrano olives if you get a chance… pretty mild green olives… have a very meaty taste. One of my favorites, although for some reason they only seem to come with the pits in them, which makes them a bit more of a pain in the ass to eat.

I have forever hated olives, but I bought some of these earlier this year and enjoyed them enough that it may even convince me to try some of the darker olives again to see if my tastes have changed.