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Olive Garden Scam??

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Many types of foods use MSG free alternatives like hydrolyzed vegetable protein. I seriously doubt that any restaurant doesn't use msg or its alternatives nowadays. The alternatives are all basically the same thing and cause the same reactions to those sensitive to the msg syndrome.
 
The point of this thread was about Olive Garden swapping in their dinner menus during lunch to get people to spend more. I find that wrong and deceptive. Not what the ingredients are in their food or whether it is truly Italian food or not.
 
Wow, the food snobs have really come out in force for this thread.

Seriously though, only a bitch of epic (dinner) (pro)portions could possibly get so upset over a chain restaurant. I didn't realize so many posters here were raped by Olive Garden as children. Get that precooked meat sauce out of your vags and stop being such snobs.
 
Wow, are people that naive that they completely lost the notion that lunch menus usually featured "half portions" of what the equivalent dinner menu portion offered? This has been common practice for, like, ever.
 
thecoolnessrune said:
I'm incredibly curious to know what undercover scientific discovery you have made, that has found that chicken, that is breaded, and then fried, is not fried chicken.

Please, the world needs to know this obviously warped state of physics.
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I grew up with fried chicken. I would expect that being in(from?) Wisconsin, you have very limited experience with homestyle, traditional fried chicken.

...so how about you just trust my experience? 😉
 
Raizinman said:
The point of this thread was about Olive Garden swapping in their dinner menus during lunch to get people to spend more. I find that wrong and deceptive. Not what the ingredients are in their food or whether it is truly Italian food or not.
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but silly little non-issues like this would easily be avoided when one accepts the fact that the food is terrible regardless of which menu they use, and just avoid the place altogether.


see?
 
BUTCH1 said:
Lemme think, hmm, must be about a million ways to prepare pasta, who are you to claim whats "Italian" or what's not, are you an expert or yet another keyboard snob, I'm going with the latter..
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Italians and food historians agree with me.
 
People actually believe that chain restaurants like Olive Garden actually cook the food fresh there? It's all prepackaged frozen vegetables and meals...
 
gosharks said:
source? Msg =/= glutamic acid.
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please take a chemistry class, and learn about salts in aqueous solutions.

It is sad that you do not understand how salt solutions work. FYI the very fact tomatoes are rich in glutamic acid and sodium means they must have MSG.
 
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bbhaag said:
You old timers are weird...you guys can turn anything into a pitchfork fight.
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What's your point?

Look, I don't care what people eat. That's your choice. I won't eat it but I won't stop you from doing so. Just don't expect me to go with you.
 
Sure lunch menu is cheaper but it's also much lesser amount (probably on par with profit margins of the entire business anyways).
 
richardycc said:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=olive+garden+mircowave

seriously, that's the closely guarded secret, you are not gonna get a statement from the CEO stating as such, but the lack of a huge exahust would be needed for a restaurant of that size and volume is a tell tale sign.
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It's possible that ravioli is pre-cooked at the beginning of a shift and microwaved prior to being served, with thousands of stores open and tens of thousands of employee's I seriously doubt the "closely guarded secret" would remain so and if you've ever tried meat heated from a microwave it's abysmal, I just can't believe the food is that bad with the amount of (obviously) repeat customers they get. It's possible soups are received pre-prepared but you would be very surprised at the quality of what's available these days, when I worked at US Foods they had a "food show" every year and I got to go, it's an event where restaurant owners can sample the latest offerings from vendors, lot's of very tasty offerings as vendors realize people want/need quality as much as convenience.
 
bbhaag said:
Why did this turn into an Olive Garden sucks shit vs. Olive Garden tastes pretty damn good thread?
You old timers are weird...you guys can turn anything into a pitchfork fight.
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This is hardly a "pitchfork fight", it's a reasonably intelligent debate, I haven't seen "stupid F-ing moron" used by anybody so this is a fairly benign discussion IMO.
 
Red Storm said:
Wow, the food snobs have really come out in force for this thread.

Seriously though, only a bitch of epic (dinner) (pro)portions could possibly get so upset over a chain restaurant. I didn't realize so many posters here were raped by Olive Garden as children. Get that precooked meat sauce out of your vags and stop being such snobs.
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I think I can help explain some of the disproportionate anger we're seeing here. Look at their attitudes across the entire spectrum of food quality- starting from the absolute bottom (what? gas station hot dogs? expired vending machine sandwiches?) to the very finest dining establishments & everything in between, and you'll find the most intense spike in the connoisseurs' anger curve actually occurs somewhere in the middle. Never at the worst for tasting horrible or risking food poisoning, nor at the top for being too expensive/too small portions/exclusive reservations etc. It's always somewhere in between, where they get the most angry about others' food choices. Why?

It's a function of how close any given restaurant's perceived quality (by the uninformed masses) approaches the limit of their own fine dining experience that determines just how intensely a foody needs to try & distance such garbage from their own REAL food. Absolute bottom tier food by consensus is no threat, so they don't get mad at it; they might even partake themselves on occasion. And as for anything above their known max, well that doesn't really exist, so no anger there either.

But it can result in some counterintuitive responses. For instance you might get a surprisingly calm reaction to them being told that you just tried the new triple stuffer pizza taco, & found it delicious! But if they ask what did you have for lunch, you say hamburgers, and it was fuddruckers? Watch out, because "Fuddruckers doesn't even make hamburgers because fuddruckers is total CRAP, only an idiot would eat at fuddruckers anyway because I hate how everyone thinks they're the best yet NO one knows about the hub cap grill, it's obscure because it's small and they have hub caps on the wall, and they make REAL hamburgers instead of that rancid garbage, I'd LITERALLY rather eat mcdonalds out of a dumpster, btw are you going to finish those doritos because I didn't even have lunch today & am starving."

:awe:
 
dud said:
How true. My GM was from Sicily and the difference between her homemade and OGs "Italian" food is incredible. I suppose it's the same for other ethnicitys/cultures as well.
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Even across Italy there are major differences in how 'spaghetti' is made.
 
SunnyD said:
Wow, are people that naive that they completely lost the notion that lunch menus usually featured "half portions" of what the equivalent dinner menu portion offered? This has been common practice for, like, ever.
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Get your fucking common sense out of here.....
 
LOL @ the insistance that restaraunt chains microwave all their food.

No, they don't. This is just some retarded asshole that saw a microwave in the back spreading his stick-up-assery.

Do you people really think they're unable to cook a piece of beef or chicken and boil some pasta? Is this how desperate your elitism is? 'OMG, how could those people know how cook boneless chicken? THIS TOOK ME DECADES TO MASTER!'
 
Excess salt hides inferior products. If your food is truly good, you don't need to add that much salt to it. I'm thankful that (if I'm counting correctly), we have 4 chain restaurants in this county: 2 McD's, Pizza Hut, and a Burger King. Oh, and a couple of Subway's. Those chains haven't put the mom & pop restaurants out of business, and as a result, I can get excellent food for an excellent price.

Perkins: blah, preprepared crap. Applebees, et.al.: Perkins food with noise and televisions. Red Lobster is the McD's of seafood, and Olive Garden is the McD's of Italian.

Last time I got dragged to OG, I got the eggplant parmigiana. One of my favorite dishes. It arrived: "this doesn't look like anything any of my Italian relatives make." Go ahead, head to images.google.com and search for eggplant parmigiana. Most of the pictures look similar; but there are images for one style of dish that amounts to, "if you make it this way in your restaurant, you can simply pull it out of a deep fryer, toss some sauce on it, and serve it." Though, I'm not convinced that statement is completely true. They must have to pour the salt onto it too, because with the amount of salt in my dinner, there's no way it would could have been frozen. edit: this last statement was hyperbole, in case (you people who don't know any better and just think that some of us hate chain restaurants for some obtuse reason) don't realize it.
 
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