And this is precisely why McDonald’s has a lot of locations next to freeways. If you’re on a trip with the family, you know that you’ll get clean restrooms, and you know what you’re probably going to order. It’s not going to be great, but it’ll be OK. OG is pretty much the same. Most of the food is basically edible, though not great. And sometimes you just don’t want to try that new little restaurant, because if it’s lousy, you’re gonna have to go somewhere else.
I couldn’t quite make out if it was onion or garlic or guanciale or pancetta, so I guessed garlic and pancetta (being an American and all). But yeah, definitely with bucatini! (which for the uninitiated, are sort of like an extra-large hollow tubular spaghetti)
I’m guessing it’s Roman in origin, if it’s Pecorino Romano that you see in it, plus it seemed very common in Rome, but wasn’t even on the menu in Florence or Milan.
Most likely, it would have been onion. I’ve heard that amatriciana is never made with garlic in Italy (and in Amatrice–its origin-- no onion, either), but culinary traditions are so diverse that I would be afraid to make such a blanket statement.
Bingo. When I’m driving cross country or in a strange town and need a restroom, I go to McDonalds.
Then I look for somewhere else to eat. 
In Italy there are these fast food restaurants that straddle the highway. Autogrill Their food quality is about 1 zillion times superior to Olive Garden’s.
OG offers about the same quality as a good quality frozen dinner, which is exactly what it is, so, no surprise there. It doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it - sometimes a frozen dinner is just the thing. I just won’t pay restaurant prices for it, personally.
The local Olive Garden went upscale - way upscale. But it almost doesn’t matter, because the one kind of restaurant we don’t have much is Italian. Pizza, yes, Italian no, and what we do have is just other chains.
It doesn’t matter how many times better AutoGrill is than OG. We don’t have AutoGrill, so it isn’t an option.
I like Olive Garden. I also like the little poorly-lit family-owned Italian restaurants.
Heck, I’ve been to two Italian restaurants here in Korea, and I liked those too. (Kimchi should be served with every Italian meal!:D). Ended up with some kind of spaghetti with a spicy Chili sauce. Not sure if Italian cuisine actually has such a dish, and I’m pretty sure it’s an Italian-Korean thing, made by Koreans who know what they like to eat and having a pretty decent idea of what Italian food is. The place also served racks of ribs with BBQ sauce, so I dunno. 
I’ll be honest, I don’t get this obsession with eating “Authentic” cuisine.
If you like the authentic stuff, go for it, I like it too. But sometimes I just want Taco Bell or McDonalds or Pizza Hut or whatever have you. In response to a co-worker who was giving me crap for eating at some local taco chain instead of getting “Authentic Mexican Food”: A) I doubt the guy had ever had authentic Mexican food, B) If I wanted authentic Tex-Mex, I would just go visit my parents and let my mom cook dinner.
Which I do whenever I can.
Olive Garden can be good and that doesn’t mean it’s good in an “authentic” way.
**Let me qualify myself: ** My parents are ‘off the boat’. I have several good friends who’ve I’ve grown up with who were born in Italy. I grew up in “South Philly”, which is about as 'Little Italy" as you are gonna get anywhere. My friend’s families own Italian ‘hole-in-the-wall’ restaurants AND slightly upscale Italian restaurants (plus funeral homes, and loan sharking businesses, and they ‘run numbers’).
I grew up about as Italian-American as you are going to find. I ate Italian-American food **and **authentic Italian dishes all my life.
Right now, I could crack open a can of Chef-Boy-Ardee and actually enjoy some Beef Ravioli. I could go with cow-orkers to lunch at Olive Garden and enjoy something there.
HOWEVER, this does not mean I would compare them to different types of Italian food, which are Italian-American cooking and authentic Italian dishes… All which differ from region to region in Italy, family to family in both the US and Italy, and BLOCK TO BLOCK in various neighborhoods. It’s all different on both sides of my own family!
So FUGHETABOUTIT.
.
It probably was some sort of Korean-Italian amalgam (especially if they were serving kimchi with their pasta–sounds yummy), but if you like spicy sauces, look for “arrabbiata” (usually served on penne) next time you’re at an Italian joint. Along with amatriciana and puttanesca (which also has a hot pepper kick), that rounds off my three favorite pasta sauces. Arrabiata is just tomato, garlic, red chiles, and olive oil. If you then add anchovies, capers, and olives to this, you basically got yourself a puttanesca. Both are usually topped with parsley.
Sometimes I honestly think it’s just elitism. “You went to such and such chain??? Ugh! I only go to REAL restaurants!” (Not that anyone here is necessarily saying that, but sometimes I get that vibe)
It’s not a sum zero thing. Chain restaurants aren’t evil. Eat ‘n’ Park rocks.
The neverending breadsticks and salad are nice. The food is fine tuned by OGs flavor engineers to offend very few pallets. I have been to much much better Italian restaurants but there is usually no sense in bringing the kids to one.
Grandma can kick the pants of most every Italian restaurant I’ve been to, but since she handled dinner every Sunday of my childhood I may be biased.
Slightly off topic, but OG’s meatballs are an abomination. If I wanted a spherical burger I’d leave flatland.
This is one of my restaurant rules:
- The Interstate Restaurant Rule: Always eat at chains within a half-mile of the interstate. Non-chain restaurants within a half-mile of the interstate don’t need to rely on repeat business, so they will probably be gruesome.
- The Core Competency Rule: eat what the restaurant is known for. The pizza joint might have fish & chips on the menu for the person that doesn’t like pizza, but it’ll suck. The pizza at the fish camp will also suck.
- The Best in Show Rule: don’t order a dish at a restaurant that’s made better at a different restaurant you can get to anytime soon. If the mad genius behind a local weird tapas joint puts some crazy-ass barbecue sandwich on the menu, and you live in North Carolina, order something else, because you’ll only end up comparing it to the genuine article. It’s kind of a corollary to the Core Competency rule.
- The Buffet Novelty Rule: never eat something unusual off a buffet. The weird stuff doesn’t get eaten as much as the regular stuff, which means it’s been sitting under those heat lamps longer. Those beautiful steamed crayfish at the end of the Chinese buffet in Morganton, NC? They’ve been there since last Tuesday.
My rules:
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The Dumb Waiter Rule: never ask the waiter what the “specialty of the house” is. Ask "what do most customers order around here?’
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The “When In Doubt, Order Bread” rule: if the restaurant has food you don’t particularly like, but you don’t want to get hit by the Core Competency Rule, order something made of bread, e.g. hamburger, BLT, pancakes, etc. It’s rare to screw up a bread-based dish, and even if you do, you won’t get diarrhea or indigestion from it.
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The Backwards Menu Rule: always check the back/bottom of the menu for the best dishes. The front usually has the most expensive and least satisfying items.
This cannot be reiterated enough. General Tsao’s chicken? OK. Those unusual fried mackerel? Avoid. Learned this more than once. Barely got home before exploding from every orifice.
I’m not saying OG is a fantastic restaurant, but I’m having a hard time with this “nuked” food meme people keep going on about. Unless things have changed since I was a line cook at an OG, nothing gets nuked. I don’t even remember a microwave in the break room much less on the line. The prep cooks were assigned to come in at 7am in order to get everything made before the place opened. Some things came in frozen, but not whole dishes. The cannelloni, the manicotti, the lasagna, even the mozz triangles on the apetizer menu were all made by hand by the prep cooks, as was every thing else. The sauces did have mixes to maintain “quality” but they weren’t nuked frozen foods.
Granted they’ve changed bread suppliers over the years and the recipe isn’t as good as it used to be (better for me.) And they no longer have the special cook (who was always a pretty hostess trained for that job) who’s job it was to stand at the front of the restaurant making pasta all day. But surely things haven’t changed so much since my time there that they are actually nuking food? That would just be so weird to me.