carrabas is a great chain, and one of the few I’ve eaten at in last 10 years. although couldn’t tell you last time I ate in one. We order the family bundle thing on Uber eats every few months. You get like 4 or 5 meals for like $60. Way cheaper than ordering individual at the restaurant. Is usually free or 0.99 delivery
Out of curiosity why do you "have to" eat there? The last time I ate there was about a decade ago because one of the team leads on our project decided to have a team dinner there. I'm not going to pretend Syracuse is a culinary mecca but there were plenty of options where Olive Garden should never have been one of them. Especially for Italian.
Depending on my relationship with the person I probably wouldn't go. That being said I don't really have a problem with chain restaurants but OG is definitely bottom-tier. Except the breadsticks.
Just get the soup and salad. Good enough and won’t spend a ton of money on shit food. Salad is good and it’s hard to fuck up a soup
Show up with a card and a gift certificate to a much better Italian restaurant to really drive the point home.
i went to a rehearsal dinner a few weeks ago and Olive Garden would have been an upgrade rural america is a sad place
A man with some sort of intellectual disability threw his shoe at my head, and made perfect contact, in an Olive Garden bathroom when I was a pre-teen. Fun times for the entire family in Buffalo, NY.
So I get to Olive Garden last night for a 7 o'clock dinner for 18 people. Someone has called ahead and gotten there at 6:15 to assure everything is set. We are told our table will be ready at 7. At 7:15 the manager comes over and says he miscalculated and the area they had for us only accommodates 14. He said it would be another 40 minutes or so. I tell the group that I'll just leave (4 of us with wife and kids) and then everyone could fit. Gave my brother his gift and went next door to my favorite Mexican restaurant.
I have a couple brothers. Neither of them post here anymore. I'm definitely the outlier in the family in terms of my restaurant choices.
There were 18 family members and 14 seats. I think I did a nice thing. There were 4 kids there under 3. Waiting another hour would have been a disaster for everyone. What would you have done?
This Olive Garden tangent reminded me of this old gem: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesal...ter-shows-why-its-ok-to-like-the-olive-garden