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

i was talking about eric, or what eric posted, if that's a c/p, i couldn't totally tell

yes i am agreeing with you.

has anyone here eaten at an Olive Garden recently

I thought this was funny when Best Music Writing tweeted the link and said that every year they had to read a lot of music reviews with that kind of flat, affectless prose, but the idea of it becoming a viral and something that some snarky prick would phone up and patronise her about just makes me feel bad about being amused in the first place. Yet again, I find myself hating the internet.

I like the idea of Ernest Hemingway, restaurant critic though.

this conversation covers the response AND the quality of olive garden food pretty well

http://www.theawl.com/2012/03/our-week-with-marilyn

The Venetian Apricot Chicken is just a fascinating idea. It sounds like a name for a high-risk sexual practice more than a viable entrée idea

Macaroni Grill > Maggianos > Chef Boyardee > Olive Garden

this is otm:

To me, the fact that the food is not good—and it's a fact, and that's fine as far as it goes—is less jarring than the actual experience of being at one of these tablecloth-grade macro restaurants. The whole thing is just enough like being in an actual restaurant that the ways in which it deviates from that stand out as especially baffling. The weirdly formalized weirdnesses that we're supposed to take as normal. The rituals that make regulars feel at home—oh good, I was hoping you'd ask if I needed more breadsticks—but that just make outsiders feel weird.

David: Also, once you get past the LOL Old Lady thing, the review reveals itself as a miniature masterpiece of Upper Midwest Minimalist Underminining.

i don't think i've ever been to one of these "restaurant grade" chains like olive garden, chilis, houlihan's, etc.

but lord knows i've seen a lot of their ads.

Ruby Tuesday's?

Underminining?

For me it's almost one of those situations that's inevitable, unless you want to get peevish about where to go to eat when going out with coworkers or relatives. xp

i'm surprised Olive Garden is getting so much shit. i mean, they're okay, I like the salad a lot, not sure why they are the "worst thing in the history of the world" rather than a dozen other chains

The Awl conversation about this max linked to is great.

Macaroni Grill is by far the best of these Italian chains but, yeah, my last visit was a few years ago for a coworker's birthday lunch.

Applebee's is a much better candidate for "worst thing in the history of the world."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2PkGMq7cb8

But it's got a bar!

I was going to say.

holy shit that awl article (or "conversation" or whatever) goes on forever

some good stuff in there but the way they keep digging at j gold and his so-called snobby appreciation of "chinese restaurants with no menus that are in BASEMENTS" is pretty lame

Kind of want to see what jala-maple-peno sauce tastes like.

the 20 worst restaurants foods in america

Olive Garden has wine.

http://eatthis.menshealth.com/files/book_pasta%20bowl.jpg

god, the idea of pasta in a bread bowl is just...

it doesnt like even make sense as a delightfully sinful indulgence... who would want that??

MarKuS J.
is Hungry

San Dimas, CA

4 star rating
12/17/2008

Nothin' says better than getting drunk at 5pm til 8p at Applebee's with your boss!!

nothin' says WHAT better

lovin'

"my life is a fucking catastrophe"

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.