There's a trick to eating at the Olive Garden without screwing up your face in disgust, or relentlessly mocking the food, atmosphere and menu. It's difficult to do, but you have to ignore the marketing materials, commercials and menu whenever they refer to this as an Italian restaurant. Mental editing to that enormous extent is difficult, though, even when faced with such glaring inanities as Olive Garden's "Hospitaliano!"
If you can get past that and start seeing Olive Garden as its own, unique genre, you'll find that the food is filling and bland. Hey, at least you're no longer enraged by the systematic Disneyfication of Italy's rich culinary and cultural heritage.
The famed breadsticks are airy donuts covered in harsh garlic salt while the salads are fine bowls of nutrient-neutral iceberg lettuce dotted by the occasional unripe tomato wedge. People who praise both of those classic Olive Garden draws for their "bottomless" nature are the types of people who add six hours and two stops to an airline flight to save $20. Seek help.
Same goes for the endless pasta specials, featuring a dozen or so sauces topping a few overcooked, gummy pasta shapes. Although none of it is empirically good, while downing a few bowls and rolling aimlessly back and forth in my '70s-era club chair, I experienced a Proustian recollection of the childhood dinner table (Ragú was our brand of choice) that was almost enjoyable.
With almost everything else on the menu, you are essentially consuming fat, salt and flour combined in a number of ways, reminiscent of the Taco Bell scheme of six ingredients and dozens of choices, but with garlic. The only variation at Olive Garden is which type of protein you choose to denigrate with those fundamental building blocks.
RATING: 2 CAPRESE FLATBREADS (OUT OF 10)
This article appears in Jan 21-27, 2009.