Why Olive Garden Sucks

Worthless place with pathetic food, needless snobbery and full of pretenders who think they know fine dining! I recently went to OG after a hiatus of four years, and was quickly reminded of the the cause of my long rejection.

Service was so-so, the ushers were bitchy-snobbish and wore a rubbery smile and flashed cold eyes and then rolled their eyes like a perverse urban Madonna.

First up were free breadsticks. This was an improvement to their earlier super-salty, soggy and oily bread, but it was still too salty and too margarine-y. You think they use butter? Ha!

The minestrone soup had a distinct taste of canned tomato paste and the kidney beans and garbanzo beans came from cans and were overcooked. The Tuscan sausage soup was the high watermark of our meal, it was creamy with a hint of bacon and contained slices of potato. That would do as a passable appetizer.

The appetizers were fried a million times (mille fois frié, a pun on mille feuille). You could kill with those chicken fingers, even stab. Yep, they were that hard! So dark was the crust that I thought I had fallen into a fresh dug grave. Toasted raviolis were over-toasted, many times over, generating only a slightly lighter hue. The fried mozzarella squares were all right, but how can you screw THAT up?

Up for entrées, the lasagna was all right, if a tad too oily and salty. The Fettuccine Alfredo Chicken sucked in all three measures. The fettuccine were overcooked for 3-4 minutes, so in stead of being al dente, they were al gum. As a matter of fact, at the bottom of my pile of noodles, some were COLD. This means the noodles were boiled, thrown into a colander to stay, and they were not tossed with the sauce! The sauce was floury and lacked the delicacy of fresh grated Parmesan cheese. But what do I expect when I know their sauces are shipped frozen. Eyes wide? Aghast? Tsk tsk tsk. To top it off their chicken was cheap quality and watery, no spring to it. The grilling lines were tasty though.

House Special
My wife had "Tour of Italy" which had Fettuccine Alfredo, of which I would say no more. The second item was lasagna, which I have already commented on. Finally, it had what Americans think is true Italian food: Chicken Parmesan. Now once again the crust was hard and dark. And if you pressed the patty, it did not give or spring back: in cooking school, that means you have fucked up a chicken breast, and should be ashamed of yourself. There wasn't much chicken inside either due to heavy use of meat tenderizer. It was an overfried schnitzel with thrice-thick breading.

My daughter wanted a dessert but I vetoed it. I told her I would make the real Zabaglione at home with real Marsala wine. This evening I made Chicken a la Milanèse with Sauce Parisienne and we ate well. It however brought to mind what I hated about OG and why I stopped going there.

If you are a gourmet, stay the hell away from here. If you want to impress those who are not foodies or gourmands even, bring them here. It's like pouring Seagram 7 out of Chivas Regal or Glenfiddich. If they don't know it, it won't hurt 'em.

Pasta is a gourmet food

Pasta has gotten an undeserved bad name in the US, where it is associated with red sauce and cheap Italian restaurants with poor service. That is just not true. Italian food has a lot of variety; just that what passes for Italian food in the US (except in the Haute Cuisine) is Sicilian food. Sicilian food uses a lot of olive oil, and very little Parmesan.

It's all because of the geography. Northern Italian cuisine is a whole lot closer to French and German cuisine than to Sicilian cuisine. Reason? Northern Italy has weather that allows raising cattle that feeds on grass (Sicily is a whole lot more arid). Cow's milk is converted to butter and cheese. What grows locally is used: such is the way of the world. Italian cuisine is refined and versatile.

The best Italian cookbook I know of (and most critics agree) is Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan. In that she talks about the right way of making pasta. A little bit of butter goes a long way.

How to make pasta sauce?
It is very simple to make pasta sauce at home. All it takes is some care and a tiny bit of effort. Homemade pasta sauces can be jarred or frozen, they keep for about 6 months.

Here's a photo of my homemade pasta sauce. This sauce has no olive oil or coloring. The heavy cream and fresh grated Parmesan give it a orange hue. Topped with chopped parsley and finely grated Parmesan cheese. Served over shell pasta, cook al dente and then tossed with butter. Everything except the cheese is organic.