Marilyn Haggerty's amazing Olive Garden review and the subsequent viral shitstorm

i havent eaten at one in probably 4 years but there are worse things in the world than olive garden provided you order something normal and not something insane.

Tour of Italy
Homemade lasagna, lightly breaded chicken parmigiana and creamy fettuccine alfredo.**
$23.50

lol

ha, i like that awl thing. funny.

David: That way you can get some pre-cheese in before you move on to your after-cheese.

Maria: They try to grate it all over everything. Flailing the grater over everything. The soup, the salad, your head.

David: That app opt-out happened to me at a TGI Friday's recently and I was sort of taken aback. Just like, "No, that's not the way it goes at all. I was consciously not sending you any messages suggesting that I wanted the Malibu Rum Slathered Shrimp Jammers you just described."

Maria: Yelling with the grater, at every table. "Everybody up for cheese?" I wrote it down exactly because I was just, "NO you did not just say that." I sense they must get home and just collapse in despair at all they've been saying. All the mounds of endless cheese they've been grating. It's a hell of endless cheese-misery. Cheese Miz.

David: There's some Bluetooth-y manager paying attention, noticing if they do not flog the Fonduta and issuing demerits, because Fonduta was mentioned on some conference call as that sector’s AOE (Appeteaser Of Emphasis) for the week.

the priciness is kinda crazy. i thought the whole idea of going to a place like olive garden was to get cheap food. they really sell 20+ tortellini? that's nuts.

i certainly don't recall a dish that expensive (although now that I think of it, "Tour of Italy" is probably the most expensive thing there, and is best shared between two people)

Tour of Thrombosis.

Hilarious comments on that Awl post:

beatrixkiddo1 (#2,988)

@vespavirgin I also think the food at the Cheesecake Factory is kind of strangely delicious, I just can't handle the giganticness of every single part of the Cheesecake Factory experience - the portions (three full chicken breasts in the Chicken Marsala at last count. Three!), the size of the restaurant, the size of the menu. My mom once forgot her glasses and asked for the large print menu and i'm not even kidding, it was like 100 pages long

also the slice of cheesecake they give you is bigger than a typical entree

@vespavirgin I was going to say The Cheesecake Factory! I went once in Florida when I was traveling alone on business. The only prob. with it was that one appetizer was enough to serve ten people. A quesadilla the size of your head, no lie. It came with really creditable guacamole.

i mentioned this on the Friendly's thread, but the cheap cheese thing has become epidemic in this country! its almost like a governement dairy conspiracy. i mean i LOVE cheese, most people do, but the awl people are on the money, these places make cheese distasteful and even dangerous and for that they cannot be forgiven.

But the vibe of those ads all feels crazy to me. Everyone laughing and laughing over things that aren't even jokes, like they were piping nitrous in through the vents or in a David Lynch dream sequence. "We always get together for lunch in the middle of the day!" And then wild, terrified laughter. Everyone smiling like they're in the "Black Hole Sun" video. It's all so welcoming that it makes the whole experience look like joining a manicotti cult or something.

lol this is great

Yeah, the misplaced hatred for bland basically innocuous chain stuff is sorta weird and maybe pretentious. It is just inflated slightly-better-than-institutional cafeteria pretty fatty but palatable stuff. I do not believe that OG is "terrible" or w/e unless you have never had truly crappy food.

chain commercials have always been like that. nobody dances inside a burger king or whatever. just sad shuffling feet and people taking their trays of death to their tables.

i'm kinda with the awl people though. i don't think those places ARE innocuous anymore. i think they're dangerous! and addictive.

but, remy, the point to me is that those Olive Garden and Cheesecake Factory dishes are far from bland and innocuous: they're overspiced and hazardous.

I like the idea of Hagerty as David Byrne:

Maria: Also this former editor at the Grand Forks Herald told the Duluth News that Hagerty's regular readers "would know that this is a fairly negative review since she spent a lot more time on the ambience than the food."

David: Right! She never says it's the best. Which goes back to what's best/most avant-garde about the review: ZERO in-text judgment at all. These are factual statements. It is large. It is well lit. Everyone has shirts. The judgment is implied by what’s left out, which are actual words used to describe the food.

I do enjoy the Buffalo Wild Wings ones though, if only because they imply that BW3's is like an omniprescent cabal with total control of national events

honestly, i sympathize with snobby foodies. i know their attitude can be grating and annoying, but i also see their attitudes in some cases as a form of panic. things have gotten really bad in this country. a lot of people - the majority of people probably - have gotten used to bad, cheap, and even harmful food. i never went to chains when i lived in philly, and i lived there for over a decade. and on marthas vineyard there were no chains - when we went off-island mcdonalds was kind of another world to us and we would indulge in a low-rent disneyland kinda way with the kids - but since we moved to where we are now i've had wendies and kfc and mcdonalds and i do have distinct memories of liking that stuff when i was a kid but now it honestly HURTS me! i pay for eating there. my body isn't acclimated to that food. and it tastes terrible! kfc chicken is really really bad chicken. it has this very foul - no pun intended - aftertaste to me that tastes like cheap unhealthy meat. these places need LOTS of chicken and cheese because they are everywhere and they end up using horrible stuff. even cheap pizza places that would never win any prizes use this cheese now that just reeks of chemicals. i look at the meat "valu-paks" they sell now at the supermarket and i think they should be banned from the market. so, i sympathize. it's almost like a lost cause to rail against big business food/chains cuz that stuff is so normal. it is the national diet.

sorry didn't mean to go all fast food nation...this is all obvious. i love road food and snacks and sweets and all that. but i just think the actual ingredients have gotten deadlier.

thats just another longwinded way of saying i don't think this stuff is "innocuous".

have you ever gone into a chain place and everyone in the place looks very unhealthy and also dangerously overweight? people struggling to get up from the table after their meal? this is no longer "fun" food!

yeah, i know exactly what you are talking about, scott.

i also think maybe people are overselling the extent to which hagerty's review was this poker-faced bad review in diguise. it clearly was much less than a good review, but i don't think the descriptions of e.g. the seats for those waiting were of the "damn them with faint praise" order. that's information that a lot of people want to know (even if most of us wouldn't care).

at the same time, kevin hoffman is obviously an asshole and it says everything about citypages that he's not just a freelancer but the editor. i live in a city of about 250,000 and our "alternative weekly" is 5x better than the twin cities one.

i concur with scott and i must repeat my annoyance at the idea stated in that awl piece that going to a small, family-run chinese restaurant is somehow 'snobby'

love this exchange

HOFFMAN: I just wanted to call to tell you how much I enjoyed your Olive Garden review.

HAGGERTY: Oh, I'm sure you did.

City Pages is a shell of what it once was.

Like, I imagine, most VV-run satellites.

or most alt-weeklies :(

have you ever gone into a chain place and everyone in the place looks very unhealthy and also dangerously overweight? people struggling to get up from the table after their meal? this is no longer "fun" food!

tbh most people in those places look to be about 17. I'm from Wisconsin and all but never had the experience of "wow, everybody here is fat"

yeah, i think her review was just a local paper review/story of interest. most local papers will write a story about a new business like that. the isolated quotes do give it that hemingway/beckett/eliot minimalism vibe though. that windswept mid-west deadpan thing. which is cool.

this happened to me when i would go to the local Friendly's chain here that closed recently. seeing the unhealthiness. it was pretty glaring. whole families. i felt bad for them!

It's probably even more depressing to contemplate the sheer cost of eating healthy, or cooking for yourself. I try not to feel smug when I see fat people eating, but it's an uphill battle.

David: Like, "why is this person all on my ass about the breadsticks? I am fine with the very large amount of breadsticks I already have."

Maria: "What are you doing here again with that basket of ancient-garlic-scented sofa cushions?"

David: Because I am still working my way through the last batch o' cushions, thanks. They taste like they were flavored by Glaxo SmithKline, but I’m working on them.

Who are these two? They are fantastic.

eating healthy and cooking for yourself would be way cheaper than eating at olive garden. i'm sure i could make a good healthy meal that costs less than four people eating at mcdonalds too!

I could probably benefit from a course in grocery economics.

The gay thread and the Olive Garden threads finally intersect

It still feels like I'm spending way more to prepare a meal for myself than if I were to just buy a frozen pot pie.

now we need Lex to write a piece about his first visit to an Olive Garden in Poughkeepsie.

The gay thread and the Olive Garden threads finally intersect

"Here, you're family."

xpost -- He wouldn't like it, it would be situational comedy.

Just remembered an Italian restaurant that's worse than anything else ever -- Fazoli's. I'd rather eat Sbarro every day for the rest of my life.

I just started reading this, seems like it is relevant to this thread's interests.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517rHnCIMIL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

the physical deterioration scott describes is brought home to me every time I stop at a Florida Turnpike rest stop before midnight and peek into the Sbarro.

i could make a yummy spaghetti and meatball dinner for four with fresh garlic bread - and even grate fresh parmesan on the garlic bread before i put in the oven for you cheese lovers - and do it for, like, 20 bucks. in 30 minutes. average cost of mcdonalds meal per person is probably what? 6 bucks or more? plus gas money to get there and back? and a salad. i'd make a salad. still cheaper probably.

i concur with scott and i must repeat my annoyance at the idea stated in that awl piece that going to a small, family-run chinese restaurant is somehow 'snobby'

― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Wednesday, March 14, 2012 10:06 AM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

capn save a gold here

Here's the real problem with places like OG. This item is a freakin' appetizer:

Item 	      Calories 	Total Fat (g) 	Sat. Fat (g) 	Sodium 	Carb. (g) 	Fiber (g) 	Protein (g)
Bruschetta 	950 	   13 	            2.5 	 2860 	  173 	          6 	           35 

950 calories!!!

holy shit @ at that sodium count

for BRUSCHETTA.

I assume they're referring to chowhound-style authenticity trawling and not just the mere act of visiting your local chinese restaurant.

well that probably is for a table of people tbf

I mean who orders a big plate of bruschetta and then chows down on the whole thing alone