“Don’t you want more of the unlimited salad and breadsticks?”
“Oh, no; I’ve had my fill; nothing wrong with it, but it no longer interests me.”
“That’s interesting, Jon; hold on to that thought while I explain this to you…”
You just slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
Infinite breadsticks
Just get yourself free
Like Sbarros?
Stop dissin’ Olive Garden, you hipsters. It’s a perfectly fine (if not really Italian) restaurant.
But what do I know? I got dumped by phone call several times. Wish I’d gotten a good meal out of it at least.
That’s where I meet my organized crime contacts when I want to publicly execute them with a gun I keep behind the toliet.
If by “perfectly fine” you mean “pasta reheated in a microwave and liberally drowned in off-brand jars marinara” then I’d agree. If I wanted a good meal that consists of more than copious amounts of breadsticks and salad, however, I would go elsewhere. Pretty much anywhere else, actually.
Stranger
And then you throw dog poop on her shoes.
It occurred to me after seeing this thread that this whole idea could be a guerrilla marketing effort on behalf of Olive Garden, itself. In any given city, hundreds of couples must break up every day. If they all did it at Olive Garden, the place would be packed. Happy couples would avoid the place, lest they give their partner the wrong idea, but only a small fraction of them would have been coming to Olive Garden anyway.
Businesses are always looking for ways to differentiate themselves from their competitors. What do people think, would specializing in the break-up market bring in more business than it pushes away?
( Snip )
Well I had a girlfriend that actually preferred Olive Garden to any of the number of much more “real” Italian restaurants in the area. In fact, the few times we actually did go to the places serving much more authentic fare, she found a reason to complain about everything. ( I guess it wasn’t bland enough )
“…the best paaaart of breaking up is Olive Garden in your gut!”
Why would you take someone somewhere in particular to break up with them? I thought that breaking up with someone consisted of not taking them anywhere.
Never heard of the cliche. It kinda sounds like a hipster sneer that if you cared about your SO, you’d be taking them to the cool family joint where no one speaks English and the menu hasn’t changed since the 1970s.
Of course, people in suburbs or rural areas don’t exactly have 5 of those in their neighborhood.
While Ive been able to tell things are going south on a dinner date, I’ve never had a break up occur there. These days it’s usually by texting or ghosting. In the past, over the phone or just be ignored me having your SO always having other plans
I came in here expecting a discussion on how poor the food is. Mischief Managed
Never heard it. The only Olive Garden cliche I know is that the head chef is named Mike Rowave.
Whatever, hipster.
You may know a lot of stuff, but it may surprise you to learn you’re not the final word on which restaurants are good.
Think I’ll head on over to the OG. And I’ll enjoy it.
The name of this forum where this OP was posted is IMHO. We are all entitled to an opinion on how good a chain restaurant is.
Basically this. The first Olive Garden I went to (the first I’d ever seen) was actually decent. This was literally decades ago (easily 30, maybe 40 years ago). My sister liked it because they had ricotta cheesecake, which is not common. We went a few times. Then, we didn’t go for a while, and when we went back everything had changed and the food was slop. Very disappointing. They were bought out by a corporation or something, and all the food was prepared at some factory in Texas and shipped frozen to the restaurants, where it was nuked. Bland and no more ricotta cheesecake.
That’s what often happens when a small chain becomes a conglomerate. The original La Salsa was founded in 1979 very near to the house where I grew up. It was awesome authentic Mexican Food. Little by little they turned into Americanized crap.
Well, that’s the first time I’ve been accused as being cool enough to be a hipster, but the food prepared and served by The Olive Garden restaurants is objectively not good. This isn’t just my opinion; the manager of the Starboard Value hedge fund that owns part of The Olive Garden’s parent company Darden Restaurants published a 294 slide presentation on the various problems with the restaurant particularly highlighting food quality and customer service. Chain Italian restaurants are not generally known for their “authenticity” to the actual and varied cuisine of Italy but most manage to produce a reasonably cromulent product; The Olive Garden is almost in a class of its own in terms of how unappetizing the food is.
Stranger
I haven’t had a break up since 1983 when my first wife threw an alarm clock at my head, missed and put a dent in the drywall. I left and that was the end of that. This was long before there were any Olive Gardens around here and I wasn’t about to buy her good food to tell her I’m done with her even if there had been.
Another weird twist is how my father, a conservative turned into a raging “Fox-hound”, was always discriminating in his food tastes, especially Italian fare. Suddenly he had good things to say about Olive Garden, Red Lobster, and Papa Johns. It didn’t pass my smell test. Turns out he took up with the propaganda of the Darden Group and John Schnatter regarding their opposition to the ACA.
In turn, his anti-boycott of sorts changed his “tastes”, in that now he patronizes the same type of McFood he would have turned his nose up at decades ago. I do not believe there is any cognitive dissonance here in this case either.
I would never choose to eat at Chili’s, Olive Garden, Applebees, etc. I think that it’s crap. But I’m not going to be a dick about it if I’m in a group and that’s the consensus. I’ll always find something that I can eat there. Just get a grilled cheese. It’s not going to kill you.