I’d never been to an Olive Garden before this week, but I’d thought about it a lot: everything looks so delicious in the commercials. And it sounds nice, doesn’t it? “Olive Garden”, like somewhere you’d want to hang out, idling beneath vine leaves and drinking a glass of wine.
I have been thinking about Olive Garden more than usual the past few days – specifically its breadsticks, which were singled out for abuse in a 300-page report written by one of the restaurant chain’s investors, a hedge-fund up in arms at the perceived waste of food (and trying to gain greater control of the parent company’s board).
It’s the breadsticks, along with the bottomless salad bowl, that have of course made the franchise famous, both for its generosity and as a symbol of the gluttony and excess laying waste to America. Olive Garden is the sort of restaurant that one loves as a child and should supposedly outgrow – but that kind of snobbery overlooks a fundamental fact about human nature: no one ever, ever outgrows a good salad bar (or hot breadsticks, for that matter). It would be like outgrowing the need for a hug.
So while debate this week has ostensibly surrounded the restaurant’s commercial efficiency, all anyone has really been wondering is this: is Olive Garden – and by extension a big slice of American restaurant culture in general – gross or not gross?
The nearest branch to me is slap-bang in the middle of New York City’s Times Square, which is not somewhere you want to go unless you absolutely have to, even on the promise of free carbohydrates. The last time a restaurant in this area made the news, it was Guy Fieri’s Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar, which was slammed momentously and hilariously by Pete Wells in the New York Times for being worse than hell in high season.
Olive Garden, at first glance, looks like similar territory: as with all restaurants in the neighborhood, the foyer smells like an old man’s closet, with off-black carpeting that was probably once a color. But then you ride the escalator to the second floor and, with the lights of Times Square twinkling outside, before you know it, you are ushered into a dim booth in the chain restaurant of your dreams.
At this point, I should note that sending a woman who is five months’ pregnant with twins to review a restaurant is like sending an alcoholic to check out a bar. They could’ve served me a buttered place mat and I’d have eaten it quite happily and ordered a second.
That’s not the point, however. The point is the breadsticks. As cited in the activist investor’s report, official Olive Garden policy is for servers to bring out one breadstick per customer and one extra for the table, but instead, servers have apparently been dumping a lifetime’s supply of bread on the table, most of which ends up in the garbage.
Before you can judge the truth of that assertion, however, you have to tackle the menu. Another of the report’s criticisms was that, contrary to real Italian cooking, Olive Garden does not salt the pasta water. (“If you Google ‘How to cook pasta’,” ran a line from the report, “the first step of Pasta 101 is to salt the water. How does the largest Italian dining concept in the world not salt the water for pasta?” Hmmm. If you Google “how to be expert in Italian cooking”, I wonder if the first step is, “Google it”.)
Salt water is the least of Olive Garden’s authenticity problems. Other items on the menu include chicken alfredo pizza – that is pizza with pasta on top, a New York favorite that makes chicken tikka masala look like authentic Indian cuisine. And then there’s the chicken and shrimp carbonara, which feels like an invitation to the wrath of God. By far the maddest thing on the menu is deep fried lasagna. But I’m conservative with menus, so I order the regular alfredo and wait.
And then they come. Oh, they come – wrapped in silver lining to keep them warm, three fingers of sponge-like bread with the smell of the oven still on them. They’re not hard and crunchy: they’re like iced buns but, instead of icing, they’re slathered in butter and studded with salt. Salty cakes, tender to the touch, soothing to the nerves, expanding to the stomach.
Next comes the salad bowl, and although I’m disappointed it’s not a salad bar – no scope for building a pyramid of food structured around lettuce scaffolding and cannily angled tomato wedges – it’s still a good salad; onion, black olives, peppers, crunchy lettuce, perfectly baked croutons and not over-dressed. I’m having such a good time that I get a little panicky that someone might to take it away from me.
(Obviously, they offer to put cheese on everything.)
At the next table, a pair of British tourists are working their way silently and methodically through the bread basket, breaking off now and then to shovel forkfuls of pasta into their mouths with the dedication one imagines Brunel brought to building the Clifton Suspension Bridge. If they could only be captured on film and piped into Scottish polling stations, it might swing the referendum: who wouldn’t want these guys on their team?
I finish the breadsticks. I finish the salad. I make a dent in, but do not finish, the alfredo – which was delicious – and get it packed to go, with an order of chicken parm for later.
It mightn’t be authentic Italian, but it is authentic something. American pastoral, perhaps? I couldn’t have had a better time if I’d been eating at Nobu.
A final word about the breadsticks: when they get cold, they change their natures, like the mogwai in Gremlins. The butter congeals; the dough solidifies. It’s like eating a salt encrusted hand towel. My advice is to eat them quick and get out, before they bring more.