THE GURGLING COD

Area columnist reviews Olive Garden

What it sounds like: 

After a lengthy wait for Olive Garden to open in Grand Forks, the lines were long in February. The novelty is slowly wearing off, but the steady following attests the warm welcome.

My first visit to Olive Garden was during midafternoon, so I could be sure to get in. After a late breakfast, I figured a late lunch would be fashionable.

The place is impressive. It’s fashioned in Tuscan farmhouse style with a welcoming entryway. There is seating for those who are waiting.

My booth was near the kitchen, and I watched the waiters in white shirts, ties, black trousers and aprons adorned with gold-colored towels. They were busy at midday, punching in orders and carrying out bread and pasta.

It had been a few years since I ate at the older Olive Garden in Fargo, so I studied the two manageable menus offering appetizers, soups and salads, grilled sandwiches, pizza, classic dishes, chicken and seafood and filled pastas.

At length, I asked my server what she would recommend. She suggested chicken Alfredo, and I went with that. Instead of the raspberry lemonade she suggested, I drank water.

In its preoccupation with the banal, it reads like a Nice Pete/Raymond Carver collab -- in review of the basically unreviewable, it imbibes the spirit of the third-rate undergraduate student newspaper. But this is actually a grownup. Thanks to Andrewiseverywhere. PS- I now see I am late to the party. 

 

Back on the grind

Where is Alexander Pope when you need him? 

I’ve gotten over being mad, now I’m just sort of sad. Found some stuff this morning and I’m having trouble not taking it personally. This is the worst I’ve felt since taking on the adventure of building Clover. Not sure what to do about it.

I discovered this morning that a bunch of our employees including some of my most trusted managers are setting the coffee grinder to a very very fine setting when making coffee for themselves. I was assured “we always do it right for customers,” and before that sentence was finished I just felt worse. This isn’t a case of poor training on technique, it’s a case of employees not buying into what we’re doing.

It's like Kevin Barnes all over again. And the only thing that can fix it is satiric couplets! 

Freaky Friday

Spotted at the day job:

Is the young gentleman saying he would prefer to live in a world where he could hunt ducks with sexy lady bodies, or is he saying he wishes his girlfriend had a bill instead of a mouth? 

Sifton Soundtracks: Mia Dona b/w The Members, "The Sound of the Suburbs"

It's a huevo de gallina for Mia Dona. Sifton appears to be saving his A game for loftier fare. It's disappointing. Based on complaints in Chowyelpistan that nobody reading the NYT food section should be expected to know who Liev Schreiber* is, I had the exciting idea of annotating his next review as a public service. But, jeebs, Sifton gets about as deep as a kiddie pool this time out. Counting Crows? Even the Applebee's reviewing Silent Majority knows who they are. But it does sound like the kind of place that's hard to get excited about, and is on Sifton's radar primarily because of the place it used to be before Psilakis left. So, like kudos for getting through the writeup without mentioning Olive Garden.  But Sifton does get to remind you where he grinds:

And so here is the new, chef-less iteration of Mia Dona: exactly the sort of decent, middlebrow, red-sauce Italian restaurant you’d relish if you found it in a town near the town where you grew up in the suburbs of New York. Within the five boroughs of New York City, we call that sort of restaurant satisfactory.

The enthusiasm Sifton brings to having NYC as his beat in nearly every review is infectious, mostly. It's as if he spend his formative years chained by the ankle to the steam table at a Ponderosa, and is happy to be eating better than that.

But the review is criminally thin on soundtrack inspiration. With its invocation of the red sauce places of yore, Sifton dares you to go with "Scenes from  an Italian Restaurant," but the Cod is congenitally allergic to Billy Joel, who is the Lynyrd Skynyrd of Tri-State fifty-something hausfrauen. Thus a song to play off Mia Dona, back to where it belongs, which is to say not in New York Fucking City, where solid Italian food is not good enough.

 

*I can think of at least two folks who would be happy to tell you that Schreiber is to sex what the stickle is to the pickle.

Who would hang a name on yewwww?

First and foremost, the irony here you'd need a Stay-Puft sized Alanis to sing about:

More outrage over GOP's approval of bondage-themed night out than systematic policy of actual bondage/torture.

True. Via Colson Whitehead, via Lizz Winstead. If you are not reading Colson Whitehead's Twitter, you are chexting yourself.

But! Evidently, da club where they ran up the controversial tab is not even a real bondage club. According to the Huffpo, (which knows from sex clubs, evidently "recent reviews testify to Voyeur being something of a 'velvet rope' type of place -- more a haven for celebrities to dip their toes into some sanitized version of outre culture than an out-and-out bondage club. Like a Ruby Tuesday of gothic sex at which you might see Mickey Rourke."

 So. Many. Questions. What, exactly, is Ruby Tuesday the softcore version of? Even The Gurgling Cod, who developed the 120 Days of Olive Garden concept, is puzzled. And why do they fail to mention that Mickey Rourke visits this club in his coke-dealing mime from the 70s persona? And Brody Jenner! I can't think of much that's more depressing than opening a sex club in West Hollywood and having it a) compared to a Ruby Tuesday, and b) having Bruce Jenner's son be your tentpole celeb. But speaking of such things, even though the magazine is much tamer than the book, it's nice to see the People's Pickle get some love from O -- on newsstands now -- look for the issue with Oprah on the cover.

Salad Days

A feature like post-collegiate kitchen makes sense, or would if young people read newspapers. But honing your culinary chops so that you can emulate the Olive Garden experience at home? To put it another way, is this a salad or a cry for help?

Via YM.

Even better than endless salad and breadsticks? I think not.

It's hard to know where to begin with this pitch for Playboy's Girls of the Olive Garden(NSFWish) , which the Golden Fiddler tumbled upon. Is it the question of why it is the shock troops of America's obesity epidemic that are being thus featured? It is it the implausible statement that looking at pictures of seminude employees of a faux Italian restaurant chain could somehow be "Even better than endless salad and breadsticks"?  It is it the charmingly 1995ish appellation "cyber club" for the online presence of what once was actually an influential print magazine? Is it the fear that somewhere, in some dingy corner of the Internet, there are naked pictures of Olive Garden patrons?

Or is it the general sense that this might be the best evidence yet that these are, indeed, the Last Days? Or is it just another Guiteau Monday?