I like food, some might even call me a foodie.  Recently I have by virtue of my job and friends who don’t cook begun to eat out more and more, before this I cooked most everything I ate.  So I’ve gotten to eat at a lot of various places I would never otherwise come by.  

Today my friends I ate at the Olive Garden restaurant.For those no in the know the Olive Garden is an Italian themed chain restaurant owned by the powerhouse of casual dining, Darden Restaurants.  If you’ve never heard the name Darden Restaurants then you just haven’t looked hard enough because chances are you’ve eaten at one of them.  They own Red Lobster, Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, Bahama Breeze, Seasons 52, and the Capital Grille.  They make a lot of money.Back to the Olive Garden, upon first entry into the restaurant you are greeted by a bizarrely open foray with an annoying pretentious (this is a chain restaurant) super-waitress who takes your seating order then in a strange waste of time walks over to an awaiting underling who prepares your table.  

Throughout the restaurant you see the ideals of forced culture: the plates on the wall that if you look close enough are the same five plates on each wall, just in a different arrangement, the fake stucco walls, the hard painted chairs, the windows in the dividers in the restaurant that aren’t glass but plastic.Then there is the menu where each sub-menu has it’s Italian and English language counterpart, the most pretentious of which is the “Pizze (Pizza)” distinction.  Pick a language, people aren’t drooling fools.  The menu items themselves sound promising on paper, classic sauce and pasta combos, no real surprising or unique flavor combinations.  Ho-hum.Well, one would reason, with a menu so sparse then the chefs must be well versed in their preparation and thus ensure a singularly satisfactory dining experience.  Umm no.  The food is bland as hell, the sauces are thin and uninspired, the pasta is obviously mass produced cheap crap, the salad is soggy, and everything about this food…is mediocre at best.  If I had made any of these dishes I had sampled at home, I would throw them out and consider it a failure.  

Food quality was just poor across the board, from the dry Chicken Marsala to the deflated plate of Seafood Alfredo.  As if the chefs and servers know the subpar state of their food, the presentation of this food is dour and just plain sad.  The food is arranged on the plate as though in the back room there is a slightly retarded monkey doing the plating.

This leads me to wonder why so many people enjoy this Olive Garden.  Are they simply puppets of inviting, family centric commericals?  Pawns of the marketing gods of Darden Restaurants?  Or is the American public at large lacking in taste.I think it’s a little bit of both.