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| - When oh when was my last Olive Garden experience? It may have been a birthday take-out meal for a family member at the Green Tree location or an eat-in at the one in West Mifflin. If I had written Yelp reviews for those encounters(these were pre-Yelp adventures and are sadly out-of-print. check Ebay), I'd give them a 3; terrif salads, apps, and service, not-so-terrif entrees and desserts. *sniff, sniff*
Sorry, I feel guilty slagging them now, even though their commercials are still the most cloyingly contrived ads you'll ever see on television and must have been dreamed up by an ex-"Charles In Charge" writer.
No, no, no, I am finding myself (under protest since they're the chain we all love to despise) giving Olive Garden 5 stars. What happened? Has Darren W. been bought off? Has he sold out?
What happened was that the meal started off fine and just got better and better as we dined.
We began with those soft, warm, already-buttered, utterly hearts-a-flutter breadsticks. What else would you put on them? You don't even need marinara sauce!
You don't even need it for their brilliantly battered and fried calamari. The breading stays on the squid like clothes stay on a prude on a first date. Plump, firm-to-the-bite, exploding with flavor upon hitting the incisors, these may be the best calamari ever to be coated and plunged into hot oil. This is why I have to fight the urge to order calamari as an appetizer every time I see it on a menu. Blame Olive Garden. Blame a chain.
Oh, back to dipping sauces, they give you two; the aforementioned marinara, and my favorite of the two, the parmesan-peppercorn which is like ranch dressing but better.
Let's not forget that salad, that simple, simple Garden Salad they offer with free refills (!) dressed with that amazing and mysterious House concoction of theirs. Emphasis on DRESSED. Yes, they do it for ya, the way I think all salad should be served. It's all too rare not to find your salad dressing in a plastic cup off to the side.
You mean you'd rather have The Grilled Chicken Caesar Salad? They have it too. But why?
Entrees...you say?
I had the Shrimp & Crab Tortelli Romana, which is new to their menu, and is a rather worthy addition. Read this caption from the website and weep...
"Shrimp, crab and smoked mozzarella-filled ravioli, topped with sautéed shrimp in a three cheese and sun-dried tomato sauce."
The ravioli are slightly understuffed, but they make up for it by being generous with the amount of ravioli they give you and by positively, lavishly applying that oily, cheesier-than-a-B-movie, sauce to it all. Then there's that fat little shrimp that burst in your mouth like the calamari which must be prepared by a chef with a supernatural knack for knowing when seafood is cooked to that elusive "just right" stage.
The juicy and thick beef-medals that were included in the Steak Gorgonzola-Alfredo that Kay ordered were ever-so-slightly gummy with grill marks making them more than presentable and noodles and sauce that won me over as much as my ravioli did.
Someone in Corporate must have found out somehow (spies?) that my father got me an Olive Garden gift card for Christmas as our dinner had been eerily perfect thus far. Dinner would have been enough, really, nut noooo...we had to go and order dessert.
As I said early on, their desserts never impressed me much, not that I can even remember what I ever ordered for dessert.
Well, I got something that suspiciously doesn't sound all that Italian; Warm Apple Crostata.
It's an apple crisp/cobbler thingamajig that you have to wait about 5-10 minutes for. While I waited, Kay and I teamed up on her Black Tie Mousse Cake, a Devil's Food/cheesecake/custard chimera that is worthy of its cred as OG's (Ice-T would like it here I think) top dessert. It's cold, it's fudgy, the chocolate chips on the back are kinky and dangerous like a dominatrix. It adheres to the palate, it ties you up, it makes you like it.
Just as we put the kibosh on that elegant freak of a post-meal treat, out came the Crostata.
There are certain things that take a foodie to Nirvana; the perfect union of warm and cold being one of them, and the crostata achieved this in spades. It's a necessity, really; the ice cream cuts the sweetness of the dessert and cools the hot dessert down enough for you to eat it painlessly, blissfully. It's burnt where it should be, crunchy where it needs to be, soft and sweet where it's got to be...
If it were a woman walking down the street, traffic accidents due to distracted motorists and neck sprains from turning heads would occur. As a friend of mine would say, "Dahyum!"
Ok, so The Crostata is Betty, and The Black Tie Mousse Cake's Veronica. Or...ok, The Crostata is Angela Gossow, and the BTM is Christina Scabbia. And yes you can go troika, ya perv.
OG=way above OK. Ask for waiter Eric V. if you can.
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