Not super exciting story, but this just happened like 10mins ago. I was looking for Radon Mitigiation service near me and made a typo and spelled Radon as “Rason”, it autocorrected to “Ramen”.
All the soup is made in house, broccoli is blanched and then microwaved to order, Alfredo is made in house, red sauce has a base in a can but is finished in house, meat is cooked on a grill or sautéed. People are there chopping shit at like 7 or 8 AM.
Applebees and chili’s are probably better candidates.
-spent too much time working at OG
Pro tip: order a fried lasagna with a kids Mac and cheese on top
I used to love Olive Garden as a kid. In particular, I liked how the lasagna was light and fresh-tasting with a bright-red marinara sauce, cut in a square and served on a plate. It was a stark contrast to the typical kind found at other Italian-American restaurants, where it’s heavy, drowned in a brick-colored sauce with long-cooked flavors, and served in an oval baking dish that’s spent too much time under the broiler.
I went there a few days ago for the first time in decades, specifically to try that lasagna and figure out how to replicate it at home, but I was served something a lot closer to the typical lasagna instead of the one I remember. Is my memory faulty, or did they change the recipe at some point? And if they did change the recipe, do you remember the old one well enough to give me any tips about making it?
I didn’t cook so I can’t help with a recipe but I think they used to hit it with a fresh scoop of sauce before it went out. I can’t remember if it was a standard though.
Some scenarios that might get you a less than stellar lasagna:
Someone plates it early and it sits under the warmer while the order is being cooked.
Someone in your party eats salad really slow or orders more than average of salad or soup. Servers put a “hold” on food so the ticket floats until a predetermined time they select or until they manually push it. So if I expect your chicken to take 8 minutes and set a hold for 7 but get busy and a third salad bowl is ordered, my float might have expired while I was greeting another table. Now I have to either bring your food early and risk you feeling rushed or leave it under the warmer until you’re done with salad. It’s tricky!
Serving is hard y’all, the difference between 20% and no tip can happen in minutes, and it can totally not even be something you have control over. Time feels different when you’re sitting there waiting for me to finish my mandatory greeting talking points so you can ask for more bread. I’m glad I found my way out of doing it and I still get uncomfortable when I can see my server struggling anywhere I eat.
I hate the weird power imbalance that tipping culture creates in American restaurants. I don’t go out to eat that often, but I always try to be super chill with the server and tip well. I can’t begin to imagine having to do that job.
It is really bizarre. I worked at a wannabe-Chili’s restaurant in the Midwest for a while. The most unexpected thing I learned was that college-aged couples understood the struggle. Different people on different occasions, they’d be super easy-going, and they tipped me $20 on a bill of like $18.
This made such a huge difference when I was making literally $2.13 an hour.
Bigger families with kids or stuffy "business meeting " people usually ran you ragged and tipped like garbage, also while leaving the surrounding area absolutely demolished after camping around long after their meal.
Life is easier if you just always tip 20% no matter what. I go to restaurants to eat. It’s not my job to judge the waiter, and who am I to judge someone I don’t know on a job I’ve never done?
Tipping is stupid, yes, but that’s the culture and people need it to live. Only exception I make is if a restaurant has a required gratuity (usually 18%), I don’t tip any additional.
I love watching Youtube videos of native Italians eating at Olive Garden. It’s not just that they hate the food because of course they do, it’s that they get so incredibly angry at the very concept of someone daring to call that food “Italian”.
Used to work at chilli’s. Was about the same. Stuff brought in warmed/cooked in house. Half way through my time there they changed some cook tops for those conveyer belt machines similar to the pizza ones. Mostly for seafood and other easy timed foods. Prep guys were also there at like 9 am. Chips were made in house. Most meat also cooked to order. Most sauced were brought in bags and just warmed. All veggies and the like were fresh daily.
I usually like everything, but Olive Garden is the one restaurant I won’t even go to if someone else is paying. Absolutely God awful what they do to pasta there.
Hey stealing enemy supplies works great especially when said enemy is too stupid to poison or burn it. Just ask General Sherman, the march to the sea wouldve been a lot harder if Southern leadership was smarter.
Resources are finite, especially during war. They don’t want to poison or burn food that they need to eat. The idea is that you stop the forward march of the enemy before he gets to your food stores. If you can’t stop his advance then you have bigger problems than the enemy looting your food supplies.
Ditto, reading about Alfredo, “red sauce”, fried lasagne, “brick coloured sauce” and mac and cheese in this thread makes me both gag and wonder what they serve as Italian food in the states. I don’t even live in Italy any more so I reset my standards a long time ago but…
There are a few nuggets that are still only obvious when you actually think about it. Like don’t fight with a hill behind you because you might need to retreat, do fight with a forest behind you for the same reason.
Or ‘fight with the sun behind you’ or ‘leave enemy soldiers an obvious escape route’ or ‘be careful with marshy terrain where logistics will become a nightmare’.
Or that castle sieges were much more boring than made to seem and would last months
Huh, what media are you talking about? Might just be the generes I enjoy but I’ve never seen anything suggest that castle sieges didn’t last ages. Wouldn’t that kinda go against the point of a siege?
Maybe it’s got to do with a confusion of language. Not every attack on a fortified structure is a siege. Like the battles at Helm’s Deep or Minas Tirith in Lord of the Rings could be confused with a siege because they are battles around forts and cities. But the intention was to destroy these places, not make the inhabitants surrender.
It was even more boring than that. The amount of food you need vs is available plus roads mean your pretty limited in what you can even try to do until engines.
Olive garden is always a great experience for me. Never had the impression that the food was microwaved. Probably best not to pay a meme that much attention
You mean he actually boiled the pasta and tossed the salad?
I’m exaggerating but when you think about the things that Olive Garden are known for (unlimited bread sticks, and their soup and salad deals), they’re all essentially premade. I don’t know many people who go there for the steak, for example.
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