Olive Garden

The Grand Parkway Marketplace is bringing a lot of favorite franchise places closer to us here in Northampton--now we have an Olive Garden.  We enjoyed our meal, it was reliably "Olive Garden", but were not blown away.  I think of it as the McDonalds of mid-range Italian, which I don't mean disrespectfully--you know what you will be getting.  This Olive Garden delivers, particularly now that the servers are settling in and the initial mad rush to try it is over.

We went on a Saturday at 5:30 and were kind of expecting to wait, but we didn't have to.  We had the Shrimp Scampi, angel hair pasta with mushroom sauce and vegetables, Steak Gorgonzola, and cheese ravioli, along with the usual salad and breadsticks, with a dessert

The execution was within acceptable range but seemed just a slight bit off.  The breadsticks were just a touch overdone, but still good.  Salad was just a little wilty but was fine.  The Shrimp Scampi was just a slight bit overdone.  I'm not a real fan of Olive Garden pasta, I think it's overcooked, and this was consistent.  It didn't have a lot of flavor--not enough garlic for me.  I like their braised beef with tortellini and would go back to that next time.

The angel hair with mushroom sauce was fine, the sauce is kind of mushroom-soup based.  The cheese ravioli was pretty good as well (this was for a child, so kept simple).  The steak on the Steak Gorgonzola was good, it was cooked exactly as ordered and had a noticeable but not overwhelming gorgonzola flavor.

We had the Black Tie mousse cake for dessert. Sweet and chocolatey, kind of heavy mousse but it was fine.

America's relationship with the Olive Garden is complicated.  It tries to be upscale while appealing to as many people as possible, much like McDonalds.  It's actually hard to find olives at Olive Garden--the rule is that there are supposed to be exactly two in your salad, though we looked and found several more in ours.  All of their olive-oriented dishes have failed to stay on the menu. The chain has been undergoing a makeover since 2014, losing the faux Italian setting for a more generic, color-blocked look.

The service was competent and polite, though the server was a bit fuzzy on some details.  As I said, it's Olive Garden, and this location represents.  I'm sure we will be back.

My Yelp Review