Olive Garden - A Treatise

Taken mere seconds before the Chicago Appetizer Riot, which led to the Unlimited Soup Salad and Breadstick Act of 1938.

Haven’t you always wanted to say, “Let’s go get some dinner – I know a great little place that just opened up on 19th!” Of course you have, because I’m projecting my desire to be a classy metropolitan bachelor onto you. However, before my family moved to Portland, we lived in a town called Salem, and in Salem there was no great little place that had just opened up on 19th. Despite being Oregon’s capital, Salem insists on not having any upscale, locally owned restaurants. There are nice restaurants, to be sure, restaurants where the food is expensive and polite people bring it to you, but were you to up and fly to a similarly sized town in Wisconsin you’d find all the same restaurants, the only difference being that the people eating in them would like hockey. Case in point: On prom night, we went to a seafood restaurant that regularly makes patrons wear a hat shaped like a trout should they be unlucky enough to be eating there on their birthday. Any restaurant that incorporates public humiliation into the experience can’t even hope to call itself upscale – I don’t care how many finger bowls they put out after they serve the fish and chips.

My mother is a culinary fanatic: For every inane fact I know about Firefly, she knows three about herbs and spices, and don’t even get her started on polenta. Thusly, living in Salem for the ten years that we did was a real challenge for her. We would drive around at night looking for a place to eat, somewhere new and exciting with a nice atmosphere and food that didn’t come out of a white cardboard box with SYSCO written on it, and we would inevitably end up in a place that had mass-produced sports memorabilia on the walls and half off appetizers after 9:00. Please keep in mind that future civilizations will find the remains of our TGI Friday’s, our Applebee’s, our Red Robins, and they will think that these were museums, and that the crowning artistic achievements of the human race were The Kramer and black and white pictures of firemen in the 1930s – they are, however, the most refined and artistic things in Salem, or at least they will be until someone opens a Thomas Kinkade gallery there. These were frustrating times for our family, but especially for my mother, who hated having to drive all the way to Portland for a good meal in a classy restaurant. While Dad and I would complain about the lack of seriously good dining in Salem, we were generally happy with anything that was deep fried and maybe served with a zesty dipping sauce, but Mom genuinely needed something more.

Olive Garden seized on this desire among the women of America for a great little place that just opened up on 19th, and they set forth to get rich by mass producing distinct family-owned characteristics like long waits for a table and slow service with all the forced authenticity of any chain restaurant. In all of Salem, there existed only one Olive Garden, about half an hour away from my house in a neighborhood not too different from the one where Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed. Of course, Olive Garden was my first steady girlfriend’s favorite restaurant, and so I spent many evenings commuting across town and then jostling with thousands of other hungry would-be diners in the mosh pit of a waiting area, intently staring at the big plastic disk the matre’d had given us and willing it to start flashing and vibrating. A hundred years ago, bells were commonly used to signal incoming telephone calls and dinner, but now both of those duties have been relegated to vibration.

I bring up Olive Garden because I ate there just a few days ago with the crew of the very same public access cop mockumentary that I sacrificed Wednesday’s update to write a script for. Eugene, it seems, also has only one Olive Garden, and since everyone loves Olive Garden, getting a table at 6:00 on a Thursday was about as easy as getting tickets to see Hannah Montana singing “Ebony and Ivory” with Barack Obama, backed up by Elton John on piano, with an opening act by Jesus Christ of The Bible fame. There were literally hundreds of people waiting inside, forcing us to cluster around pillars and wrought iron benches outside the restaurant like fine dining hobos, warming our hands around a fire, waxing poetical about how many breadsticks we were going to eat, and glaring at the people getting quick and cheap food at the Chili’s across the parking lot. Say what you will about Olive Garden’s food, or service, or ambiance – they’ve served me good meals and they’ve served me bad meals. However, the one thing Olive Garden has been really consistent about, every single time I eat there, is making me stand around and wait half an hour to get a table. They never show that in the commercials, do they? No, in the commercials, everyone is happy and eating Italian food and listening to Louis Prima, like an episode of The Sopranos without The Sopranos in it. The commercials never show the hungry people standing around outside, listening to Louis Prima’s tinny voice being piped out under the awning to toy with our Pavlovian association of Prima and overpriced Italian food.

By the time you actually do get a table, you’re so hungry that you’ll eat just about anything and think it’s fan-dabby-fabulous. For all we know, Olive Garden could suck by normal standards, but nobody will ever be able to be sure because you can’t get into the place without waiting until at least two people in your party have died of starvation and you’ve already started seriously considering cannibalism. At that point, they could charge $30 for a solid block of Metamucil and I would most likely pay for it, and not just because I understand the merits of dietary fiber.

Truman Capps was going to write an update about marijuana for this update on 4/20, but instead he decided to write about food and hope that his readers are too stoned to notice.