Restaurant 1

Sureya Gafurova
September 23, 2014
ENGL 004-05 Basic Writing
Ms. Shannon Muclewicz
Paper 2 Description of a place

We all have our favorite restaurant that we prefer to dine in. There is always that one restaurant that you will resort back to when you don’t feel like taking the risk of trying a new place out. Why is that? What kind of evaluations do you conduct on a restaurant when you dine? What factors lead you to believe a restaurant is perfect for you? I’m going to discuss some of these factors on one of my most frequently visited restaurants “The Olive Garden.”
The Olive Garden is a franchise chain of Italian food restaurants. The restaurant has over 780 locations spread out all over The United States and Canada. They are reasonable mid-priced compared to their competitors. Their prices could be comparable to the Outback Steak house or that of a local Mom and Pop Italian restaurant. For the type of food Olive Garden serves you would expect the pricing to be in comparison to that of an upscale fine dining Italian restaurant.
The Olive Gardens business goal is to create a genuine Italian dining experience. The interior and exterior designers went to great lengths to make the restaurant look and feel just like an authentic Italian restaurant in Tuscany, Italy. In fact, Olive Garden continues to remodel their chain of restaurants based on actual Italian architecture, art, and interior design. If you were to visit the Olive Garden corporate website you would find many pictures posted of Tuscany, Italy and the inspiration they use to design their restaurants. You begin to feel this experience just as you are pulling into the parking lot. The outside of Olive Garden is usually painted an off white color with grape vines leading up the side of the walls. Old brickwork and wooden benches make up the exterior design. The exterior of the restaurant are always well maintained.
As you walk through the front door, you are always greeted by a friendly hostess, and the smell of rich Tuscany Italian food. However, Depending on the time of day or week you attend you may also find it to be so packed you can barely fit through the front door. The problem is Olive Garden is such a well-known franchise restaurant. The overcrowding is a problem at most of my local locations during holidays or busy weekends. You may find yourself waiting up to several hours to get a table. Olive Garden does not offer call- ahead seating or reservations. This slightly takes away the feeling of a fine dining restaurant, as there is no way to plan ahead and get a good table. However, they always have a small bar section with open seating tables. If you are a regular customer and know about the bar seating, you may be lucky enough to snag a table and skip the wait.
Once you are seated at a table you will quickly notice the old Tuscany interior design. The walls are draped with Italian art and the interiors are always designed to portray a family owned Italian restaurant. The server will greet you with a basket of fresh bread sticks. The bread sticks are one of my favorite appetizers at the restaurant. They are almost always warm, battery and fresh.
The food menu at the Olive Garden has an excellent variety. The restaurant is always introducing new foods to the menu. You can expect to find a variety of pasta dinners, steaks, soups, salads, calzones, pizzas, and even seafood. At first, this may strike you as weird that an Italian restaurant would have so many varieties of food. However, each meal has its own special Italian herbs and spices that bring back that Tuscany Italian taste and feeling. The food variety also provides a kids menu and special gluten free allergy menu that caters to guests with food allergies.
The only down fall to the food variety at Olive Garden is the nutritional value. Most foods on the menu are high in calories, carbohydrates and sodium. However, with most Italian food being based on pasta and rich sauces, you won’t find very many Italian foods in low calories or carbohydrates. So I asked myself, what are the largest factors that made Olive Garden one of my favorite dining choices? The Answer was simple in comparison to what most people would expect from a good dining experience. It was very clean; the atmosphere was relaxing and comfortable. The food was priced to meet the expectations of my taste buds. The service was friendly and welcoming. Most importantly, in comparison to the local restaurants the menu had more choices to fit my needs.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_Garden http://www.darden.com/restaurants/olivegarden/

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_Garden http://www.darden.com/restaurants/olivegarden/