An Italian Tourist Walks into an Olive Garden…
What happens when you take two unsuspecting Italian tourists to the Olive Garden? Are they family? You’re about to find out.
Photo by Ivana Larrosa
“We have a brand-new menu item,” said our waiter Nathan with zeal. “It’s….It’s…..” he paused not really sure how to describe it. “It’s sort of like a muffuletta sandwich but it’s a fried olive and it’s stuffed with things.”
Despite the reference to the famed New Orleans sandwich and our waiter’s southern accent, we weren’t in the American south. Nor were we even at a Southern restaurant. We were in New York City dining at the Olive Garden.
In a city in which you can’t throw a meatball without hitting an Italian eatery, why, you certainly wonder, would a self-proclaimed New York food lover (not to mention a food writer) spend an evening dining at a chain Italian restaurant of questionable quality?
I was amazed that such a restaurant would have the audacity to set up shop in New York City, one of the best restaurant cities in the world. This city of nearly nine million hungry people, with nearly 25,000 restaurants, is like the 21st state in Italy. We practically own Italian cuisine outside of Italy. More so, in the last decade and a half, Italian cuisine in the city has become so in vogue to the point of over exhaustion. Restaurants serving regional cuisine, especially Roman (Emporio, Maialino, Antica Pesa, Camilo, etc.), a Neapolitan pizza trend (Keste, Starita at Don Antonio, Ribalta, Motorino, Una Pizza Nepoletana, plus way too many others to name here), and fine dining Italian (Babbo, Felidia, and Rezdora, the latter from a protégé of Massimo Bottura, chef/owner of über-lauded La Francescana in Modena, Italy) have all sprung up sometime in the last two decades to change the Italian dining landscape in La Gran Mela. And let’s not get started about the two perpetually mobbed big box Italian food super-stores with the terrible name across from Madison Square Park and at the World Trade Center.
There are five Michelin-starred Italian restaurants in New York, down from 10 a few years ago (to compare, there are 19 Michelin-starred restaurants in Rome, five in Venice, and eight in Florence, all of which, of course, are Italian).
We can’t seem to say “basta” when it comes to Italian cuisine. Not even Italian tourists can. When they travel, they often eschew the local cuisine (at least for a few meals) and eat their own food, as if they need a fix, a culinary injection of Parmigianino, red sauce, and gluten to keep them going while they’re doing a proverbial space walk outside of the boot.
And so, with all this Italian dining going around, why not visit the most famous Italian restaurant in the country. Since Italians have a proclivity for dining on their own cuisine while abroad, I thought I’d snatch a couple of them and take them with me to the Olive Garden.
photo by Ivana Larrosa
I put the word out on Facebook that I was looking for some Italians, tourists or short-term visitors, to take out to dinner. My friend Sloane responded, saying she knew a married couple from Rome who are temporarily living here and are very opinionated about food. I didn’t tell Marco and Giovanna where we were going. Only that I’d be picking up the tab and also picking the place we would be eating. They were game. They had no idea what they were in for.
We met at a bar on West 23rd Street and, after I eased their inhibitions with a few glasses of wine, I led Giovanna, Marco, and our mutual friend, Sloane, to the corner of West 22nd Street and Sixth Avenue.
“I think it’s going to be Ray’s Famous Pizza,” Marco said.
“No, I hope it’s Del Posto or Babbo,” Giovanna added.
That’s when I said, “ta dah!” and fanned my arm up at the Olive Garden logo, like I were a model standing next to a car on display at an automobile show. (This location has since closed, leaving the Times Square location the sole Olive Garden in Manhattan.)
Marco covered his face in disbelief. Giovanna said, “I’m not sure we’re going to survive this.”
We were seated in a large booth immediately. Nathan, our waiter, doled out the menus, which were big on photos and little on description.
My Italians scanned the menu. “This might as well be a Chinese menu,” Marco said.
“True,” Giovanna said. “There is nothing remotely similar here to anything you would find in Italy.”
The “Tour of Italy”
Carbonara, a simple Roman classic of pasta, egg, pecorino, and guanciale, was heralded on the menu as spaghetti, chicken, shrimp, Parmesan cream, bacon, and red peppers. The so-called “Tour of Italy” consisted of lasagna, chicken parmesan, and fettuccine alfredo, the latter of which is of questionable origins in Italy (so much for that tour!). The rosemary chicken came with mashed potatoes.
“This,” said Marco, pausing, shaking his head from side to side, “is not Italian food. I just don’t recognize any of this.”
Marco and Giovanna had only heard of the Olive Garden once or twice, but they immediately got the idea. “There is an Italian phrase,” said Marco after we ordered our food. “’Li ti avvelenano’, which translates to ‘there they will poison you.’ This is my predication for the night.”
When the food arrived, we took turns staring at each others’ plates. The “muffuletta olives” (not their real name—on the menu they’re called “Parmesan Olive Fritta”) were olive ascolane, stuffed fried olives, and they were quite good, actually. I had the carbonara, which at $26.99 is priced about the same, or higher, as the pasta dishes at some of the city’s best Italian restaurants. It didn't taste like it, though. In fact, miraculously, despite the presence of parmesan cream, chicken and shrimp, it managed to be utterly tasteless. (Just for the sake of authenticity – not that authenticity is the Olive Garden’s M.O. – you’d never, ever find carbonara served with chicken and/or shrimp and the presence of cream is a culinary war crime.)
Marco took a few bites of his “Tour of Italy” dish and said, “I’m ready to turn in my passport and stay home for a while.” Giovanna didn’t hate her salmon which was paired with bright green stalks of steamed broccoli, saying only that it would never have pesto spread over the top. And Sloane’s garlic-rosemary roasted chicken was rubbery.
Okay, no surprise. The recipe developers at Olive Garden HQ may have never stepped foot in Italy. And the people back in the kitchen at this particular Olive Garden were maybe not properly trained to cook Italian cuisine. At least not well enough to please the advanced palates of actual Italian people. But in a country that is becoming increasingly fond of high-quality food, hyper-local and seasonal ingredients, and non-corporate/chain restaurant food, the most surprising thing about the Olive Garden is how unforgiving the place is to not adhere to modern eating habits. There were no signs of things like kale, roasted Brussels sprouts, or pork belly. No arugula or broccoli rabe, two common side dishes in trattorias in Italy (when they’re in season, of course). And perhaps that’s what makes a lot of Americans like it so much.
The Olive Garden is a lot like those Americans we sometimes meet who identify with another country, usually a European one. They may have been born in south Philly or Savannah but somehow manage to think of themselves as “Irish” or “Italian” because they might have a name like O’Donnell or Della Croce; or perhaps their grandparents or great grandparents were born back in the old country, even if said person has never even been to Ireland or Italy, and they still manage to refer to themselves as being from there.
Though the Olive Garden continually puts out special menus like a “Taste of Tuscany” and even claims to send restaurant managers and chefs to (what turns out to be a fake) cooking school in Tuscany, there’s not much that’s Italian about it, like a fourth generation non-passport-holding guy named Tony Valentino in the New Jersey suburbs.
It’s ultimately a suburban, Midwestern restaurant. An eatery that belongs in a place where there is no history, just an area we’ve created that is in a vacuum of the space-time continuum; a fake restaurant meant to evoke a real destination but one that’s wholly imagined in the less-traveled diner’s mind. A restaurant that jams the message down your throat that “when you’re here, you’re family,” when you’re really not; that this is Italian food, when it’s not; that this is a food worth paying your hard-earned money for, when it’s not.
So what is worth paying for? When I asked Marco and Giovanna about their favorite Italian restaurants in New York, Marco confessed he prefers to cook at home. When pressed, he admitted that he Giovanna both like Il Buco Alimentari i Vineria. “But,” he added, holding up his finger to denote there was an addendum coming, “it’s just not the same. There’s an almost machine-like quality to the Italian food here. But that trattoria in Italy where a family has, for generations, been cooking, you just can’t replicate that.”
The Italian restaurants in New York, if we’re to go by this Roman’s pronouncement, cannot and never will be able to compete with the mother country. Which in a way, then, puts them in the same league as the Olive Garden. Sure, Jody Williams at Via Carota and Andrew Carmellini at Locanda Verde, for example, are much more skilled than that poor under-trained chef overcooking my pasta in the back of the Olive Garden and they certainly at least attempt to adhere to both trends and Italian flavor profiles, but one thing they will never be is real Italian.
When I asked my friend Ryan Hardy, chef and co-owner of New York restaurants Charlie Bird, Pasquale Jones, and Legacy Records, about the challenges of creating “real” Italian outside of Italy, he agreed it was next to impossible. “The ingredients are simply different. The meats are raised without corn, the fish are caught from the Mediterranean—and no matter how much we think we can ship them fast—it never is.”
He added, “Once you have the ingredients, then comes the next and biggest challenge: to have the guts and skill to cook like the Italians. The simpler the food is—, say, orecchiette and broccoli raab—the more the technique shows. You can't hide behind anything like sauces, sous vide preparation, expensive china or squeeze bottle dots.”
The Italian cuisine craze in New York was partly born out of the decadence of the ‘90s (cosmos and skyscraper cuisine, anyone?). We yearned for simplicity and we got it with Scott Connant’s spaghetti and tomato sauce at Scarpetta. The lesson here to gauge vis-à-vis the Olive Garden is the state of Italian in New York City.
“As chefs,” Hardy said, “and I include myself in this, we try to take the ideas of Italian food and adapt them to the fast-paced, eat-with-your-eyes-first, what's-the-next-hot-app-on-your-iPhone-society that is American dining culture. And unfortunately, somewhere in that process, we lose the essence of exactly what Italian cuisine is—about sitting, relaxing, having a bottle of wine at lunch and discussing the intricacies of life.”
Okay, so we’ll never be Italy. And in order to eat authentic Italian, we’ll have to jump on a plane that’s pointed toward the Italian boot. Which is probably a good thing. Globalization, it turns out, isn’t that great planet shrinker it seemed to be.
As for Marco’s prediction, that “Li' ti avvelenano,” “there they will be poison you,” Sloane emailed the next morning to say she had terrible stomach pains.