1.21.2008

The Olive Garden Experience

This doesn't look very appetizing - does it? I wish I had gotten a better picture of the asparagus. They were skinny, brown and yucky looking. The broccoli didn't look so bad but it tasted horrible. Even Paul thought so, and he's not picky.

Saturday night Paul, Esther (my sister, who'd been visiting for the week) and I decided to go to The Olive Garden for supper. It was the most amusing and longest dinner we've ever experienced. Our food took forever to get to us - we went through four salad bowls and five bread stick baskets while we waited. Only one of the three main course dishes was hot. Refills on our bread basket and salad bowl took ages... turns out there had been some sort of drama in the kitchen - running out of appetizers, burning some dishes, etc.

The only complaint we had that evening was about my limp asparagus. I'd ordered my chicken dish mainly because asparagus sounded so yummy. And even in the 'complaint' we were nice - I just asked the waiter if he could see if there was healthier look asparagus. Nothing nasty. I even smiled and said please and thank you.

Our waiter was a cool dude. Flustered. Scatter-brained a bit. But cool.
About an hour and a half into our dinner experience the manager came to our table and said that our waiter had told her about everything (we're not sure what 'everything' was... but we weren't going to ask!) and that dinner was on the house that evening. Sweet!

We decided at that point that we each wanted dessert =) I asked our cool-dude waiter what he thought about a chocolate and strawberry cake. He made a face and said it was disgusting. When have you ever met a waiter that said anything on the menu was disgusting? We loved this waiter.

We ended up getting a nearly $60 meal for free. Totally worth the two hours we spent sitting at the table laughing and enjoying each others company =)



Judah and Paul at The Olive Garden

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Matt and I had a smiliar experience at The Cheesecake Factory earlier this month... took over an hour to get our food that wasn't even freshly hot snd we ended up getting out meal comped.

The Rock Chick said...

You know, I used to really like Olive Garden, but the one nearby my house closed and I hadn't been for quite a while.

We took my grandparents to one a few months ago for their anniversary and the food and the service was horrible. Like you said, it took forever for the food to arrive and it did not look appetizing at all. I've worked in restaurants and some of that food should not have been served.

I don't think I would ever eat there again.

Bethany said...

Maybe The Olive Garden is going downhill. There is a new one near where we live. When we went, our dinner took a long time to come and our salad tasted like an old bagged salad. Weird... Usually our Olive Garden experiences are very nice, so this was rather unusual.

Crystal said...

The last time we ordered from them, my squash and zucchini looked horrible. I didn't eat it.

I'm not sure we'll be going back either. I much prefer the food at Macaroni Grill anyway. Never had a complaint there!

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