journey to olive garden
a tour of italy in second person.
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If you had told me a few months ago that I would be going to Olive Garden at 3pm on a Thursday, it would have been a warranted cause for concern. And yet! Last week, in a burst of spontaneity only afforded to someone both unemployed and in crisis, I found myself driving forty minutes and crossing the seven-dollar-toll San Mateo Bridge to the Olive Garden in Hayward.
You think I’d endure the visceral experience of America-core dining and not take you along? Please.
After driving through an undetermined stretch of suburbia, you see the leafed kelly-green logo in the distance. There are always parking spots available. The woman at the host stand is wearing all black and a pin that says “When you’re here, you’re family.”
Plastic menus in hand, she welcomes you into a world at the intersection of hotel-chain-interior-design and easy-to-clean fabrics. The menu has two sides, busy and empty at the same time. Normally you’d go for a shrimp scampi situation, but because you’re temporarily vegetarian (long story) you settle for the eggplant parmigiana. Swag.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The strawberry passionfruit lemonade is too sweet in a way that only a little kid would enjoy (you are a little kid). The salad has pepperoncinis (a banger). What you’re really waiting for are the legendary breadsticks; the reputation and lore have preceded them. You’re ready to taste magic.
And they’re, like… not that good? Pasty and so uniform you know they’ve been frozen in a factory elsewhere, seasoned with salt and nothing else.
When the eggplant parmigiana arrives, you’re already a little full. The eggplant, paired with cream of mushroom fettucini, is decent. Not good enough for you to ask for a to-go box, but good enough for you to push yourself to finish it.
Everything is fine, so fine that after fifteen minutes of deliberation, you pull the trigger on the chocolate cheesecake, assuming that it’d also be some flavor of fine (it was indeed fine). Aggressively sweet and cloying, it is shamefully decadent. You have no regrets.
When you step outside, you are neck deep in a food coma. It’s still so bright out — 3pm is a weird time for a meal — and you don’t know what to do with the rest of your day. There is no job to return to, no productive thought or thing you could will yourself to reach for right now, especially not after this seminal experience of mediocre American dining.
Not mediocre as in bad, necessarily. Mediocre as in common denominator. Mediocre as in chained across the world, localized to local taste buds and A/B tested to hell. As of 2012, Olive Garden accounted for $3.8 billion dollars of revenue, over half of the overall revenue of its parent company Darden. It’s the kind of restaurant Jeff Probst would dangle as a reward in front of weary and starving castaways on national television — no matter their age, color, or creed, every single one of them has heard of the big OG.
An intrusive thought bubbles up. You realize that what you just sat down for was not the meal, but rather the veneer of a fine dining experience for middle class America. When you tell a friend you’d never been to Olive Garden before, she said “aren’t you from the Midwest?” There are Olive Gardens everywhere, but this question makes sense. It is part of the suburban aesthetic, a poor man’s tour of Italy.
But on a Thursday at 3pm — why did you want to go in the first place?
Perhaps there is safety in attaching yourself to American mediocrity. You know this well. You wonder how deeply you’ve internalized a need to assimilate. No matter how much you’ve #decolonized, will there always a kid inside who — no, not craves, but — is both intrigued and repulsed by the cultural cornerstones of white America?
Deep down, will there always be a kid who begs her parents to take her to Olive Garden so she has something in common with her classmates? Okay, fine — how about Red Lobster? How about Cheesecake Factory? How about Outback Steakhouse? How about Applebees? How about Chil—
Another wave of fullness hits you. Your limbs are leaden and your chest feels heavy. You’re very familiar with this, the feeling of being sedated by food, and you wonder if it’s finally time to write that essay. You know, the one about your body. The thought of this makes you anxious; you swim away from it.
In your nauseous stupor, none of these half-baked spirals make sense anyway. It’s not that deep. Olive Garden has nothing to do with class or race, nor the yearning of a cultural common denominator in your childhood, nor how much you punish yourself with too much food or not enough.
Don’t read too much into it. Choke on a breadstick. More eggplant parmigiana.
Well, maybe another time.
You just ate, after all.
Author’s Note:
Despite advertisements about an Olive Garden culinary institute in Tuscany, no such institute exists. However, a number of managers and cooks travel in Tuscany each year, where they stay in a rented hotel and spend a few hours in a local restaurant.
loved every bit of this