Growing up, you are either in a chain restaurant family or not. Quick lunch during errands? Panera Bread. Friday night dinner? Applebee’s.
But those cherished occasions, like birthdays or passing a torturous class — looking at you, Organic Chemistry — call for the most special and gourmet establishments.
This is where Olive Garden comes in.
One of the biggest slights in my life was not being born into one of these families. Therefore, I never had the pleasure of enjoying the endless wonders Olive Garden had to offer.
I needed to rectify this.
One balmy Tuesday afternoon, I traversed to the Olive Garden in Rohnert Park with the hope and dream of pasta … and breadsticks and salad and potentially a cocktail or two. Being in Wine Country, I deemed it a crime to order wine alongside my Olive Garden feast.
Upon entering, I was met with the overwhelmingly pungent smell of sweaty Parmesan cheese. It blanketed the entire restaurant, which resembled a corporate hotel lobby — a beige, carpeted monstrosity.
While being led to our table by the host, I observed our fellow diners. I brought the average age down approximately 45 years.
Our host led us to a lovely table in the middle of the restaurant, a fantastic spot for people watching. I breathed in the cheesy air as I examined the menus. I had to go for the endless pasta, salad or soup combo. Under strict instructions to stay far away from the soup by a former Olive Garden employee, I opted for limitless pasta and salad.
For cocktails, I chose the Italian Rum Punch to start, which included rum, amaretto, strawberry and passionfruit. I also couldn’t pass up the bright, fuschia-colored cocktail that caught my eye like a bird spotting something shiny. Aptly named the Sicilian Sunset, it combined prickly pear lemonade and pineapple with vodka. Both drinks were a sickly sweet concoction of liquor and fruit, but so much fun with bright colors to match the Italian seaside-inspired ingredients.
The house salad was classic: a bed of watery yet crunchy iceberg lettuce with black olives, tomatoes, shredded carrots, pepperoncini peppers, croutons, and — you guessed it — Parmesan cheese. The dressing was zippy and acidic, the salad served on an ice-cold plate to keep it cold. A novelty to me, I may steal this trick for my future salad endeavors.
The first round of hot, buttery breadsticks paired well with the salad. Breaking into the breadstick for the very first time felt like a salty, pillowy, dream come true. What’s not to like, you ask? Once they cooled off, they were a completely different story. The breadsticks saddened and hardened with every minute that passed.
Next up came the alleged “endless pasta” bowls. They offer a few different pasta shapes, sauce types and proteins, allowing the diner an infinite number of carbohydrate combinations.
In what I later recognized as a rookie move, I went for angel hair pasta with Alfredo sauce as my first bowl. Soon enough, an ungodly large bowl of pasta appeared before me. This bowl could have fit the entirety of Thanksgiving dinner inside and still have room. Fear set in.
Would I get to experience the joy of endless pasta?
I found the Alfredo sauce nostalgic, just like the packets I ate as a child. But for all the salt Olive Garden’s food presumably contains, I was shocked at the amount of salt it lacked.
It was a hard-fought battle to finish the gargantuan Alfredo, but I persevered. I just unbuttoned the jeans a little.
I was overjoyed to be able to order a second bowl of pasta, and opted for spaghetti with meat sauce, another classic. But round two of pasta took ages to arrive. Drinks, also. It left me just enough time to think about a few more bites of salad and a refill on breadsticks while I waited. This was a stark difference from round one where the pasta materialized out of thin air the second we ordered it.
The second bowl eventually arrived, and it was comically small — easily a third of the size of the first bowl. Had I not gorged myself with the Alfredo earlier, I probably could have finished the second bowl in five bites.
When I realized my Olive Garden experience was simply a case study on restaurant economics, my world was shattered. Get guests in with a killer deal, fill ’em up quick with fluff and sketchy food timings, then trim the fat where possible as guests persevere through the restaurant’s antics.
After concluding my dining experience at Olive Garden, a wave of nostalgia crept over me upon realizing that their food reminded me of all of the Stouffer’s frozen meals I had grown up with. I can now say I’ve enjoyed the endless wonders of Olive Garden, but I will not be racing back anytime soon.
