Olive Garden

I’m sure many people reading this have been to Olive Garden as it is a very popular chain with many locations across the country. It is owned by Darden Restaurants Inc. who also operate restaurants such as Red Lobster and Long Horn Steakhouse. I have visited Olive Garden many times with friends and family and pretty much always had an enjoyable experience. I actually worked as a busser at an Olive Garden last summer where I live near Harrisburg. Since I worked many evening shifts I often took advantage of the 50% off food purchased while working. Another perk of working there was 25% of any Darden restaurant when not working for up to a table of five people.

Olive Garden 1

Olive Garden is an Italian themed restaurant and the interiors are nicely decorated in-line with this theme. The menu has a good selection of appealing options including pasta, pizza, soup, salad, fish and seafood. They have a lot of great appetizers one of my favourite being the grilled chicken flatbread. It is a flatbread with Chicken, mozzarella, roasted red peppers and basil with alfredo and garlic spread. I can’t even count how many times I’ve had this appetizer, it is absolutely delicious. One of my favourite main dishes is the Chicken Scampi, it is Chicken breast tenderloins sautéed with bell peppers, roasted garlic and onions in a garlic cream sauce over angel hair. This dish is a little unusual and really enjoyable. The chicken Marsala, chicken Alfredo and pizzas are also very good. They have a create your own pizza and a chicken alfredo pizza. It is very reasonable value with the average main dish costing around $15 but if you get a simpler pasta dish it’ll be more like $12. A great thing about olive garden is that every main dish includes a soup or salad and unlimited bread sticks. The appetizers can be a little pricey so if you’re trying to save money you’ll probably want to skip out on them.

olive garden 2

I have had very enjoyable experiences coming to Olive Garden apart from a couple of times when the service was not so great but it was still not a disaster. There is an Olive Garden in the State College area but not in walking distance. They do generally seem to be of the same quality wherever you go to an Olive garden but I have not visited the one in State College yet. If you have never been to Olive Garden I would highly recommend trying it out!

4 thoughts on “Olive Garden

  1. Shiven Patel

    While many “real” Italians argue that Olive Garden is not authentic enough, I personally enjoy eating there. The only downside to trying to go to Olive Garden in my town on a weekend is that the minimum wait time is 45 minutes to an hour. I opt out of waiting that time and grab a burrito from Chipotle. But Olive Garden is always an enjoyable meal!

  2. Sarah Nicole Galang

    I really love Olive Garden, even though most of my family doesn’t. I usually go there for a nice casual-kinda-fancy dinner with my friends. I love Italian food, so I’m a big fan of pretty much everything on the menu.

  3. Kathryn Van Develde

    I agree that Olive Garden is a pretty solid place to eat. It isn’t a place I normally eat but that has less to do with the food or service and more to do with the fact that my hometown, and the area around my hometown, has a lot of family-owned Italian restaurants.
    I like your objective look at restaurants and and sad to see this ending.

    –K.E. Van Develde

  4. Diane Cascioli

    I love Olive Garden too because it has a lot of options for people with varying tastes. There’s an Olive Garden near the beach I stay at in the summer, and I thought it was cool that outside the restaurant, they had special, convenient parking spots for people who had car-pooled or those who drove energy efficient cars (random, but I thought it was a really neat, environmentally-friendly idea).

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