OLIVE GARDEN π★ ★★½
I drove east.
I want to begin with the driving because the driving is the chapter — not the food, not the breadsticks, not the four-cheese marinara that I will describe in the detail it deserves and does not expect, but the act of driving east from my hotel on Convention Center Drive across the width of the Las Vegas Valley into Henderson, Nevada, which is a city that is adjacent to Las Vegas the way a tumor is adjacent to the organ it grows on, or the way an organ is adjacent to the tumor that grows on it, and the question of which is the organ and which is the growth is a question I am no longer qualified to answer because I have been inside the body too long and the perspective required for diagnosis has been replaced by the intimacy required for habitation, and I am habiting now, I am a resident of the counting, and the counting has expanded from the notebook to the full width of the 215 Beltway, which is the ring road that encircles the Las Vegas urban area the way a tourniquet encircles a limb.
I had not left the pattern in six weeks.
This is a thing I realized on July 8th, at approximately 10:15 AM, while looking at the five book on my hotel room desk — the notebook I had told myself in Chapter 14 I was putting away and that I had not put away because the notebook was on the desk and the desk was in the room and the room was where I worked and the work was the counting and the counting was at thirty-six percent and the thirty-six percent was the contamination and the contamination was the problem, because “contamination” is a word that functions as a door and I had walked through the door and closed it behind me and now I was inside the counting and I had not left.
Six weeks. Forty-two days. Since the end of Course Three — since Raku, since the binchotan and the bone of the sanma — I had eaten at seventeen restaurants, all of them within a 2.3-mile radius of my hotel, all of them inside or within half a mile of the five-star restaurants' orbit. I had not reviewed Henderson. I had not reviewed Summerlin. I had not reviewed North Las Vegas. I had not reviewed the suburbs — the 1.3 million people who live outside the corridor and inside the valley, who eat three meals a day at restaurants that my guide had not mentioned because my guide had become a document about the fives and the counting and the pattern that the counting was either discovering or producing.
A restaurant guide that does not review the suburbs is not a restaurant guide. A restaurant guide that only reviews the conspiracy-adjacent restaurants in a orbit of a pattern is a document of a different kind — the kind written by a person whose methodology has been consumed by their hypothesis, whose data collection has been distorted by their pattern recognition, whose professional standards have been subordinated to their need to keep counting fives they cannot stop counting.
What I had not yet admitted — what the six weeks were evidence of — was that I had built a system for encountering chaos. The notebook, the five book, the digit-sum calculations, the probability tables — these were not the tools of a person experiencing disorder. These were the tools of a person who had optimized disorder into a methodology, who had done to the experience of chaos exactly what a franchise does to cuisine: extracted the variables, documented the procedures, made the unpredictable repeatable. I had built a specification for the unspecifiable. I had turned the sacred into a job. The job was the counting, and the counting was as rigid as anything Greyface could have designed, and the rigidity was mine, and I had not seen it because the rigidity wore the costume of liberation, and the costume had fooled me for six weeks, and the six weeks were on the desk in a notebook I could not put away.
I needed to leave the pattern. I needed to review a restaurant that had nothing to do with the network, nothing to do with Discordianism, nothing to do with specials board ciphers or ceremony dinners or a religious tradition that sees the sacred in hot dogs and the profane in consistency. I needed to go to the suburbs and eat at a chain restaurant and review it with the same rigor I had applied to Lotus of Siam and the Italian American Club and the Golden Tiki and write the review in this guide and let the review be what it was: a food critic doing their job. A food critic who had been, for six weeks, not doing their job. A food critic who had been doing something else — something that involved notebooks and five books and digit-sum calculations and a card in their wallet that said they were a Pope — and who needed to return to the work, because the work was the cover, and the cover must hold, and the holding of the cover was not a deception but a discipline, and the discipline was the only thing keeping the instrument calibrated, and the instrument needed calibrating, and the calibration required contact with the thing the instrument was designed to measure, which was restaurants, which was food, which was the reason anyone would read this book, and the reason anyone would read this book was the reason the book existed, and the reason the book existed was —
I got in the car. I drove east.
Henderson, Nevada. Population: 331,000, give or take — the second-largest city in the state, larger than Reno, larger than every city in Nevada except Las Vegas itself. Founded in 1953 around a magnesium processing plant built during World War II to supply incendiary bombs, which is a detail I include because the founding of a city on the infrastructure of industrial combustion seems relevant to the current discussion, which is about what happens when a city built on explosions grows into a suburb built on repetition.
The drive from Convention Center Drive to the Olive Garden on East Sunset Road is 12.4 miles. Twenty-three minutes on a Tuesday morning. 2 + 3 = 5. I noted this. I am noting that I noted this. I am noting that the noting is compulsive and diagnostic and I cannot stop and the inability to stop is the condition and the condition is the book and the book is the guide and the guide must hold even when the person writing it is adding single digits while driving on the 215 and watching, in the rearview mirror, a silver sedan that has been three car lengths behind them since Flamingo Road, which is probably a commuter and is probably not following them and is probably the kind of observation a person makes when the person has spent six weeks inside the counting and has started to see patterns in traffic the way they see patterns in specials boards.
The sedan turned off at Stephanie Street. I exhaled. The exhalation was larger than the situation warranted.
Henderson begins at the 215 interchange. Not formally — formally, Henderson begins at the municipal boundary, which is a line on a map that you cannot see from a car — but experientially, the transition is the interchange, because the interchange is where the landscape changes. West of the 215: the Las Vegas that tourists know and locals tolerate. East of the 215: the Las Vegas that two million people actually live in, the residential grid, the master-planned communities with names like Green Valley and Anthem and Seven Hills — there is a development in Henderson called Seven Hills, and 7 is not 5, and I was grateful, briefly, violently, for the not-five, the way a person on a diet is grateful for a meal that does not contain sugar.
The landscape is beautiful in the way that planned things are beautiful — clean streets, painted curbs, HOA-maintained common areas, the mountains visible to the south as a permanent backdrop of geological permanence against which the planned community performs its own version of permanence, which is the version that involves beige stucco and red tile roofs and a covenant that says your garage door must be closed by 10 PM. The beauty is real. I am not being ironic. The mountains are real mountains. The sky is the real sky — the same sky that hangs over the Strip and over the corridor and over Frankie’s Tiki Room, where the sky does not exist because there are no windows, and I am thinking about Frankie's again, and the need to stop is the reason I am in Henderson.
The chain restaurants begin at the interchange and they do not stop.
Olive Garden. Applebee's. Chili's. Red Lobster. Outback Steakhouse. TGI Friday's. Cheesecake Factory. PF Chang's. BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse. Texas Roadhouse. Red Robin. Buffalo Wild Wings. Cracker Barrel. Denny's. IHOP. Five Guys — and there it is, the five, in the name of a burger chain, and I noted it and I hated myself for noting it and I noted the hating and I drove past Five Guys and turned left on Sunset Road toward the Olive Garden, which was located in a shopping center at the corner of Sunset and Athenian Drive, and the shopping center also contained a Marshalls and a Petco and a Great Clips and a Verizon store, and the parking lot was shared among all of these enterprises in a way that made the parking lot itself a kind of community, a commons, a space where the customers of Marshalls and the customers of Olive Garden and the customers of Petco crossed paths and shared asphalt and existed, for the duration of their errand, in the same geography, consuming different products from the same infrastructure, which is either a community or a supply chain depending on whether you believe the people in the parking lot are people or consumers, and the answer, in Henderson, in the shopping center, at 11:47 AM on a Tuesday in July, is both, and the both is not a contradiction, and the not-contradiction is the thing I came here to understand.
I need to tell you about Darden Restaurants, Inc.
Darden Restaurants is the largest full-service restaurant company in the world. It operates approximately 2,100 restaurants under ten brands: Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, Yard House, Ruth's Chris Steak House, Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen, The Capital Grille, Chuy's, Seasons 52, Eddie V's Prime Seafood, and Bahama Breeze. It employs approximately 190,000 people. Its annual revenue exceeds twelve billion dollars. Its headquarters are in Orlando, Florida, which is the city where the first Olive Garden opened on December 13th, 1982, which means Olive Garden has existed for forty-three years, which is older than Henderson's master-planned communities, older than most of the independent restaurants on Spring Mountain Road, older than V. Cheval's career, though V. Cheval does not disclose their age in this guide because the guide is about the restaurants and not about the critic, a principle I established in the introduction and have violated with increasing frequency since Chapter 7.
Darden's Olive Garden operates over nine hundred locations. Over nine hundred. I want you to hold that number the way I asked you to hold the number three hundred — the seating capacity of Hell's Kitchen — in Chapter 2. Nine hundred locations means that on any given evening, in any of the fifty states, a person can sit down and order the Tour of Italy — chicken parmigiana, lasagna classico, and fettuccine Alfredo on a single plate — and the Tour of Italy will taste the same. Not similar. The same. The chicken will be breaded to the same specification. The lasagna will contain the same ratio of beef, Italian sausage, and ricotta. The Alfredo will be the same Alfredo — the same cream, the same Parmesan, the same garlic, measured and portioned and executed by a trained line cook following a procedure that has been tested and refined and documented and distributed to nine hundred kitchens, and the distribution is the product, and the product is consistency, and consistency is either a virtue or a curse, and the word "curse" is doing specific work in this sentence that I am choosing not to explain.
I parked. I walked across the parking lot. I passed a woman loading dog food into a Honda CR-V and a teenager sitting on the curb looking at his phone, and none of them were members of a Discordian network and none of them were watching me, and the not-caring was the most honest thing I had experienced in weeks. I stood in the parking lot for a moment longer than necessary, breathing the Henderson air, which smelled like asphalt and exhaust and the faint sweetness of whatever Petco was venting through its HVAC system, and the air was ordinary, and the ordinary was what I needed, and the needing of the ordinary was the admission I had been avoiding: the counting had made me strange. The pattern had made me strange. The network and the ciphers and the ceremonies and the hot dogs and the thirty-six percent — all of it had made me strange in a way that I could feel in my body, in the way my eyes tracked the parking lot for patterns, in the way my hands wanted to count the cars (there were twenty-three in the immediate lot, 2 + 3 = 5, and I was counting again, and the counting was the strangeness, and the strangeness was why I was here).
I walked into Olive Garden.
"Welcome to Olive Garden."
The greeting was standard — Olive Garden's trademarked welcome, delivered by a hostess named Brianna whose name tag also bore a small Italian flag pin and the words "When You're Here, You're Family," which is the company's slogan, which has been the company's slogan since 1998, which was the year Olive Garden dropped "The" from its name in a rebranding that cost, I have to assume, more than I will earn from this guide, and the rebranding was designed to make the restaurant feel more intimate, more personal, more familial, and the slogan is the linguistic expression of this intention, and the intention is either sincere or strategic and the distinction between sincere and strategic is, in a corporation with $5.2 billion in annual sales, not a distinction that exists, because at $5.2 billion the sincerity and the strategy have fused into a single substance the way cream and Parmesan fuse into Alfredo sauce — you cannot separate the components, and the inability to separate the components is either the point or the problem, and I was about to spend two hours determining which.
The dining room. Two hundred seats, approximately. The décor was Tuscan — warm colors, faux-stone archways, painted grape vines on the walls, a color palette of terracotta and olive green and the specific shade of gold that American interior designers associate with Italy and that actual Italians associate with American interior designers. There was a mural behind the bar depicting a Tuscan hillside that had never existed — an idealized landscape, a composite, a Tuscany assembled from stock photographs and a designer's understanding of what Tuscany means to a person who has never been to Tuscany but who has been to Olive Garden, where Tuscany is an idea expressed in paint and the paint is the idea and the restaurant is nine hundred locations and the nine hundred locations are the idea made flesh, the Tuscan Word become strip-mall.
I am being unkind. I notice the unkindness and I correct for it. The mural was pleasant. The lighting was warm. The booth I was seated in was comfortable — genuinely comfortable, the upholstery clean, the table sturdy, the space between the booth and the table calibrated for a body of average American proportions, which is to say: generous. This is something the chain restaurants do well — better, if I am honest, than most independent restaurants in Las Vegas, where the tables are packed too tight and the chairs are chosen for aesthetics rather than comfort. Olive Garden's booth was designed for the person. The booth did not care how the meal would photograph. The booth cared about my lower back.
I sat in the booth and I felt the lower-back support and I thought about GREYHOUND.
GREYHOUND. The standardization platform — the algorithmic system that promotes certain restaurants and suppresses others, that shapes the dining landscape through the manipulation of search results and recommendation engines and the quiet, legal, devastating bureaucratic machinery of compliance audits and licensing reviews. I had been thinking about GREYHOUND since Chapter 5. I had been documenting it since Chapter 9. I had been measuring its effects the way a data journalist measures anything: with data, with numbers, with the tools of a profession that believes the measurable world is the real world.
Olive Garden is not GREYHOUND. I want to be clear about this. Olive Garden predates GREYHOUND — predates the algorithmic optimization of dining recommendations, predates the platform economy, predates the internet. Olive Garden achieved its nine hundred locations through television advertising and real estate strategy and a product that people liked enough to return to, which is the oldest and most honest form of restaurant success.
But.
But Olive Garden is the world that GREYHOUND wants. Olive Garden is the destination — the end state, the final form, the fully realized vision of a dining landscape where every variable has been controlled, where the chicken parmigiana in Henderson, Nevada, is the chicken parmigiana in Dayton, Ohio, is the chicken parmigiana in Tallahassee, Florida, is the chicken parmigiana in nine hundred locations across fifty states, and the sameness is not a failure of imagination but a triumph of execution, and the triumph of execution is what GREYHOUND is building toward — not through breadsticks but through algorithms, not through Tuscan murals but through search results, not through "When You're Here, You're Family" but through "Recommended For You," which is the algorithmic version of the same promise: we know what you want, and we will give it to you, and you will be satisfied, and the satisfaction will be consistent, and the consistency will bring you back, and the return will generate revenue, and the revenue will fund the expansion, and the expansion will eliminate the alternatives, and the elimination of the alternatives will make the consistency not a choice but a condition.
The Curse of Greyface. The imposition of order onto chaos so thoroughly that the order becomes invisible, becomes natural, becomes the only option, becomes — I am going to say it — becomes family.
When you're here, you're family.
The most Greyface sentence in the English language, delivered by a corporation to its customers, promising kinship in exchange for the purchase of unlimited breadsticks, and the promise is not a lie, exactly — the breadsticks are unlimited, the warmth is real, Brianna really did smile — but the promise is a substitution, the replacement of the organic with the manufactured, the replacement of the family you have (complicated, inconsistent, capable of burning dinner and loving you simultaneously) with the family you are offered (warm, consistent, incapable of surprise), and the replacement is the curse, and the curse is the comfort, and the comfort is the breadstick, and the breadstick arrived.
The breadstick.
I need to describe the breadstick because the breadstick is the foundation and the foundation is what separates Olive Garden from every other chain restaurant in the Italian-American casual dining segment, and the breadstick is also the thing that will be, if this guide is ever read by a person who eats at Olive Garden, the thing they came for, and I owe them — I owe the reader — the honest description of the breadstick, because honesty is the system and the system is the guide and the guide must hold even when the guide is reviewing a restaurant where the guide's author is experiencing an emotional reaction to a breadstick that is disproportionate to the breadstick's complexity but proportionate to the breadstick's significance, which is cultural, which is national, which is the significance of a piece of bread that has been served approximately forty-seven billion times — I made up that number, but the real number, which I do not know, is almost certainly a number that large, and the largeness is the point.
The breadstick was warm. Six inches long, approximately one and a quarter inches in diameter, coated in a garlic butter spread and a dusting of coarse salt. The exterior was soft — not crisp, not crusty, not the exterior of a bread that has been baked in a wood-fired oven or a deck oven or any oven where the baking was the primary activity. This bread was parbaked elsewhere — manufactured at a central production facility, frozen, shipped, and finished in the restaurant's oven, which is a process that the food industry calls "bake-off" and that I call, without judgment, a process that produces exactly this breadstick: warm, soft, uniform, garlicky, and impossible to stop eating, not because the breadstick is extraordinary but because the breadstick is precisely calibrated to the human palate's desire for salt, fat, garlic, and carbohydrate in a form that requires no decision-making, no evaluation, no engagement beyond the mechanical act of bringing the bread to the mouth and chewing and swallowing and reaching for the next one.
I ate three breadsticks before I ordered.
They were, I must record, good. Not in the way that the bread at Raku is good — not good as an expression of a baker's craft, not good as a connection to a tradition of breadmaking that spans civilizations. Good in a different way. Good in the way that a warm thing is good when you are cold, the way a familiar thing is good when you are lost, the way a consistent thing is good when you have spent six weeks inside a five-sided shape that is both real and unreal and that produces, in the person who has measured it, a state of perpetual uncertainty that the person had not anticipated when they began measuring and that the person cannot escape by the act of measurement alone.
The breadstick was good because the breadstick was the same. The breadstick was the same breadstick I had eaten in high school, on a date, at the Olive Garden in the town where I grew up, which was not Las Vegas and was not Henderson and was not inside a pattern and was not adjacent to a Discordian conspiracy, and the breadstick tasted like the absence of all of those things, and the absence was comfort, and the comfort was real, and the realness of the comfort is the thing that makes this review difficult, because the comfort of the breadstick is the comfort of Greyface, and the comfort of Greyface is the Curse, and the Curse is not a malediction — the Curse is a warm booth and a garlic breadstick and a hostess who says you are family, and you are grateful, and the gratitude is the trap, and the trap is warm, and the warmth is real.
The meal.
I ordered the Tour of Italy because the Tour of Italy is the dish that most fully expresses what Olive Garden is — three items on one plate, each one a "classic," the word "classic" functioning here the way it functions in automotive advertising, as a synonym for "familiar" dressed in the clothes of "timeless." Chicken parmigiana, lasagna classico, fettuccine Alfredo. The trinity. The three-in-one. The Holy Ghost of Italian-American casual dining, and I am aware that I am using religious language to describe a chain restaurant entrée, and I am aware that the religious language is this guide's native register now, and I am aware that the awareness is the condition, and I am recording the condition.
I also ordered the Zuppa Toscana, because the Zuppa Toscana is the soup that Olive Garden is most associated with in the cultural imagination — spicy Italian sausage, fresh kale, and russet potatoes in a creamy broth — and because the cultural imagination of a chain restaurant soup is itself a phenomenon worth documenting. Olive Garden's Zuppa Toscana has been reverse-engineered and posted online more times than any other chain restaurant recipe. It is the most-copied soup in America. The copies are made by people who love the soup and want to eat it at home, and the wanting to eat it at home is a form of devotion, and the devotion is real, and I am not going to dismiss it.
The soup arrived first.
The Zuppa Toscana was good. I need to be specific: the broth was well-seasoned, the potatoes were cooked to the correct softness — holding their shape while yielding to the spoon — and the Italian sausage provided a heat that the cream tempered without extinguishing. The kale was overcooked by approximately two minutes, which I determined by the color (olive green rather than the bright green of a properly cooked brassica) and by the texture (collapsing on the tongue with the surrender of a vegetable that has been defeated by its own broth). This is a minor criticism. The soup was better than I expected. The soup was better than I wanted it to be, because I wanted — I realized, sitting in the booth, eating the soup — I wanted the food to be bad. I wanted the food to justify the contempt that a food critic is supposed to feel for a chain restaurant, the contempt that would make this review simple, that would allow me to return to the corridor where the food was extraordinary and the conspiracy was real and the breadsticks were not unlimited because the breadsticks in the corridor's restaurants were finite, hand-made, each one different from the last. But the soup was good, and the goodness was not compatible with the contempt, and the incompatibility was the review.
The Tour of Italy arrived.
The plate was large — oval, ceramic, white, bearing the three items arranged in a triptych: chicken parmigiana on the left, lasagna classico in the center, fettuccine Alfredo on the right. The arrangement was symmetrical. The portions were generous. The combined caloric value was, I estimated, approximately 1,520 calories, which is a number I mention because I am a person who measures things and the Tour of Italy is, by mass and caloric density, one of the largest single-plate entrées served by any restaurant I have reviewed in this guide, including the Beef Wellington at Hell's Kitchen, which was smaller and more expensive and meant, by my guide's rating system, the same three stars that I am trying to assign to this plate and failing, because the rating system that I built — the system that accommodated temporal displacement and acoustic architecture and ceremony dinners where the food was hot dogs — the system cannot accommodate Olive Garden, and the inability to accommodate is the crack, and the crack is new.
The chicken parmigiana. The chicken breast was thin — pounded, I assume, to a uniform thickness by a process that involved either a meat mallet or a machine, and I suspect the machine, because the uniformity was too consistent for a mallet. The breading was golden, crisp, adhering to the chicken without separation — a common failure point in parmigiana, where the breading can delaminate from the protein during frying, creating a hollow shell around a shrunken cutlet, and Olive Garden's version did not fail in this way, which means the breading process is well-designed, which means someone spent time designing it, which means someone cared. The marinara was sweet — sweeter than I prefer, sweeter than the marinara at the Italian American Club, which had a brightness and an acid edge that this marinara lacked — but sweet in a way that was consistent with the dish's purpose, which was comfort, which was warmth, which was the flavor profile of a person's memory of Italian food rather than the flavor profile of Italian food itself, and the distinction is the essay I could write and am resisting writing because the essay would be unkind and the guide must be fair.
The mozzarella on the chicken was melted correctly. I note this because melting mozzarella correctly at volume — at the volume of a restaurant serving two hundred covers — is not trivial. The cheese must be melted to the point of browning without being melted to the point of separation, and the window between browning and separation is narrow, and the kitchen hit the window, and I am giving them credit for hitting the window.
The lasagna classico. Layers of pasta, meat sauce (beef and Italian sausage, according to the menu), ricotta, and mozzarella. The pasta was cooked. I do not mean this as praise — I mean it as a description of a state that is the minimum requirement for lasagna and that some restaurants, including some restaurants I have reviewed favorably in this guide, fail to achieve uniformly, because lasagna is a dish that punishes inattention: the edges dry out, the center undercooks, the layers telescope into a slurry of indistinguishable textures, and the telescope is the death of lasagna, and this lasagna was not dead. The layers were distinct. The pasta was al dente in the center, which surprised me. The ricotta was smooth, correctly seasoned, not grainy — graininess in ricotta being the result of overcooking or inferior cheese or both, and this ricotta was neither. The meat sauce was competent. The meat sauce was the meat sauce that nine hundred locations produce simultaneously, every day, in a country where "Italian" food is, for most people, this — this sauce, this cheese, this pasta, this warmth, this plate — and the fact that "this" is what "Italian" means to two hundred million Americans is a fact I need to sit with rather than dismiss, because dismissing it is easy and sitting with it is hard and the hard thing is the honest thing and the honest thing is the guide.
The fettuccine Alfredo. Cream, Parmesan, garlic, butter, fettuccine. The five ingredients — five, always five, and I caught myself counting and I put the count down like a person puts down a drink they know they should not have picked up — of Alfredo sauce, combined in proportions that were correct without being inspired. The cream had not broken. The Parmesan was present but not assertive — not the Parmesan of a cheese that has been aged twenty-four months and grated tableside and whose crystals crunch on the tongue with the mineral intensity of something that time has concentrated, but Parmesan that was identifiably Parmesan, that performed its function in the sauce, that contributed salt and umami and a suggestion of age without actually being aged. Functional Parmesan. Parmesan that has a job and does its job and goes home.
I ate the Tour of Italy. All of it. The three items on the plate, the breadsticks (five, in the end — five breadsticks, and I am recording the number and I am not commenting on the number and the not-commenting is its own commentary), the Zuppa Toscana, and a glass of the house Chianti, which was a Chianti in the way that the Parmesan was a Parmesan — identifiable, functional, unremarkable, the wine equivalent of a person who introduces himself as "John" and means it.
The check was forty-seven dollars and twelve cents, including the wine, tax, and a twenty-two percent tip. This is less than one-quarter of what I paid at Raku. This is less than one-third of what I paid at Hell's Kitchen. For the price I paid at Aburiya Raku — $187 — a family of four could eat at Olive Garden and leave satisfied, and the satisfaction would be real, and the reality of the satisfaction is the thing I keep returning to, the thing that resists my analysis, the thing that makes this review impossible to write with the clean authority I brought to my earlier chapters, because the earlier chapters were about restaurants that were trying to be extraordinary and Olive Garden is not trying to be extraordinary and the not-trying is honest and the honesty is devastating.
I sat in the booth after the meal and I thought about what I had eaten and I thought about the Italian American Club.
The Italian American Club is 8.7 miles from this Olive Garden. The Italian American Club serves veal Marsala that is made by a cook who has made veal Marsala for three decades in the same kitchen, with the same pan, with a technique refined by thirty years of practice into something that I described, in Chapter 11, as the most honest piece of Italian-American cooking I had eaten in Las Vegas. The veal Marsala at the Italian American Club is a dish that could not exist in nine hundred locations simultaneously, because the dish is inseparable from the cook, and the cook is inseparable from the kitchen, and the kitchen is inseparable from the building on East Sahara that has been the Italian American Club since 1961.
And here is the thing I must say, the thing I have been building toward: the veal Marsala at the Italian American Club and the chicken parmigiana at Olive Garden are in the same cuisine. They share a tradition. They are both Italian-American — not Italian, not American, but the hyphenated thing, the immigrant cuisine, the food that Italian families made in America with American ingredients for American appetites, and the cuisine evolved in two directions simultaneously: toward the personal and specific (the Italian American Club, the neighborhood red sauce joint, the grandmother's kitchen) and toward the systematic and universal (Olive Garden, nine hundred locations, $5.2 billion in revenue), and the two directions are not in opposition — they are in conversation, and the conversation is the cuisine, and the cuisine contains both, the way the Sacred Chao contains both the apple and the pentagon, order and disorder in the same circle.
I am applying their theology to a breadstick. I am aware of this. I am recording my awareness.
But the theology applies. The theology applies because the Olive Garden on a Friday night — a family in a booth, the breadsticks arriving, the Tour of Italy ordered without consulting the menu because the Tour of Italy is what they always order, the always being the point — is someone's sacred meal. The predictability is not Greyface for the family in the booth. The predictability is the practice. The sameness of the breadstick is the prayer's repetition. The warmth of the booth is the temple's enclosure. The "When You're Here, You're Family" is the liturgy, and the liturgy is real, and the realness does not require my endorsement, and the not-requiring is the thing that costs me something — because if predictability is someone else's practice, then my contempt for predictability is not a Discordian virtue. My contempt for predictability is my own Curse of Greyface, applied in the opposite direction — the insistence that only the unpredictable is sacred, which is its own rigidity, which is its own imposition of order, which is the thing I left the corridor to escape and which I brought with me to Henderson in the notebook in my bag.
The Italian American Club exists because someone loved this food enough to make it by hand, every night, for sixty years. Olive Garden exists because someone loved this food enough to figure out how to serve it to three hundred million people simultaneously. The love is different. The food is different. But the love is real in both cases, and the food is real in both cases, and the realness is not diminished by the scale, and this is the thing I cannot accommodate in my rating system — this is the crack.
My rating system was built on the assumption that quality correlates inversely with scale. Raku: thirty seats, four and a half stars. Lotus of Siam: a strip mall, five stars. Frankie’s: the size of a living room, five stars. The Italian American Club: sixty covers, five stars. Hell's Kitchen: three hundred seats, three stars. The system has a bias toward smallness, and smallness is a proxy for authenticity, and authenticity is a proxy for quality, and the proxies have worked — they have produced ratings that I stand behind — but the proxies break down at Olive Garden, because Olive Garden is nine hundred locations and the food was good and the goodness was real and the realness cannot be rated by a system that equates scale with compromise.
Some rules deserve to be broken when breaking them serves a higher accuracy.
I have said this before. I said it in the early chapters, when the system first bent, when the rubric first encountered a restaurant that did not fit. I have returned to this sentence like a person returns to a prayer, repeating it in moments of uncertainty, and the repetition has changed its meaning — the first time, I was breaking a rule to accommodate an exception. Now the breaking is a confession: the rule that quality requires smallness is a rule I built from prejudice, from the particular prejudice of a food critic who believes that the personal is superior to the systematic, that the handmade is superior to the manufactured. The prejudice may be correct — it is, in most cases, correct — but it renders me unable to see the Olive Garden clearly, to see the warmth of the booth and the generosity of the breadstick and the competence of the chicken parmigiana as things that have value, real value, the value of a meal that costs twelve dollars and feeds a person and sends them back into the Henderson afternoon having been well and honestly fed.
I looked down at my notebook. I had written a rating. The rating I had written was: π★
Pi stars. 3.14159 stars. An irrational number — a number that begins with three and never resolves, that continues infinitely without repeating, that is present in every circle in the natural world and that cannot be expressed as a fraction. I had written pi stars for the Olive Garden in Henderson because the Olive Garden was irrational to my system — a value that existed between the integers, between three stars (Hell's Kitchen's rating, competent-but-soulless) and four stars (genuine excellence), and the Olive Garden was neither, and the neither was pi, and pi was irrational, and the irrationality was honest.
Except that the irrationality was calculated. I had chosen pi with the deliberate precision of a data journalist who knows the mathematical taxonomy — who knows that pi is transcendental, irrational, infinite, present in every circle in the universe — and the choosing was rational, and the rationality of choosing an irrational number to subvert a rational system was the trap. I was using mathematics to escape the tyranny of mathematics. I was reaching for a number to break free of numbers. The gesture was as systematic as anything Darden Restaurants had ever produced — a precisely engineered act of rebellion, quality-controlled for symbolic resonance — and the quality control was the Curse, and the Curse was wearing my handwriting.
Then I crossed it out.
I crossed out pi stars and I wrote: ★★½
Two and a half stars. The lowest rating in this guide. Lower than Hell's Kitchen. Lower than anything. And the rating was unfair — unfair to the chicken parmigiana that was correctly breaded, unfair to the breadstick that was warm, unfair to Brianna who smiled, unfair to the booth that supported my lower back — and the unfairness was the system's failure and not the restaurant's failure, and I recorded the failure, and the failure is this chapter, and the chapter is the review, and the review is the honest attempt of a broken instrument to measure a thing the instrument was not designed to measure.
Two and a half stars. I am not proud of this number. I am not sure it is accurate. I am sure that it is the number my system produces when applied to a chain restaurant in a suburban shopping center, and I am sure that the system is wrong, and I am sure that I cannot fix the system here, and I am recording the wrongness and the inability, and the recording is the guide, and the guide must hold.
There were five televisions in the Olive Garden bar area. I counted them on the way out. Five televisions, each showing a different channel, five streams overlapping into ambient visual noise that was not meant to be watched but to be present — to fill the silence, to ensure that no moment in the Olive Garden bar was a moment of emptiness, because emptiness is the space where the unexpected can occur, and the unexpected is chaos, and chaos is Eris, and the five televisions are five screens showing five realities in a bar where the breadsticks are unlimited and the family is a slogan and the parking lot is shared with a Petco.
Five televisions. Five breadsticks. Five ingredients in Alfredo sauce. The fives are at thirty-six percent.
I am in Henderson. I am outside the pattern. I am twelve miles from the five-star restaurants, twelve miles from the corridor, twelve miles from the five book in the drawer. I am eating at a restaurant that has nothing to do with the network, nothing to do with Discordianism, nothing to do with ciphers or ceremonies or the sacred geometry of a city built on gambling and performance and the simulation of experience. And the fives are here. The fives are in Henderson. The fives are in the Olive Garden bar. The fives are in the Tour of Italy (three items, but the name implies five — the tour of the country, the five regions implied by the sampling, the five flavors the plate attempts to synthesize into a single meal). The Law of Fives is present in the suburbs the way it is present everywhere — not because the Law is real but because the Law is a cognitive virus, a pattern-recognition malware that, once installed, cannot be uninstalled, and the installation occurred at Frankie's Tiki Room on a night I cannot remember and the malware has been running ever since, in the background, consuming processing power, counting, always counting.
I stood in the parking lot. The Henderson sun was brutal — 107 degrees, July, the kind of heat that makes the asphalt shimmer and the air ripple and the mountains in the distance waver like a painting that has not dried. The silver sedan was not in the parking lot. No silver sedan. No one watching. Just the heat and the Marshalls and the Petco and the Olive Garden behind me, where Brianna was seating another family, and the breadsticks were being replenished, and the Tour of Italy was being plated for someone who was not a food critic and not a Pope and not a person who had spent seven months measuring the distances between restaurants and finding shapes in the measurements and the fives were at thirty-six percent and the thirty-six percent was the contamination and the contamination was the instrument and the instrument was me and twelve miles was not enough to escape it.
I got in the car. I did not drive back to the hotel.
I drove west, toward the corridor, and then past it — through it, across the city, to a street called West Sahara where a bar I had not yet visited was open until three in the morning and served half-price steaks after midnight, and I needed to be somewhere at midnight, I needed to be in the city that exists after the tourists sleep, I needed the night to do its work on me, because the day had done its work on me and the day's work was the Olive Garden and the Olive Garden's work was the question, and the question was: what am I defending? What is the pattern defending? If the food at the chain restaurant is good — not extraordinary, not transcendent, but good, honestly good, forty-seven-dollars-for-a-meal-and-a-glass-of-wine good — then what is being lost? What does the network protect? What does the resistance resist, when the thing being resisted is a warm booth and a breadstick and a woman named Brianna who smiled?
The answer was not in Henderson. The answer was at midnight. The answer was steaks at half price and a bartender who knew what the city looked like when the lights went down.
I drove west. The sun was behind me. The counting was ahead.
Practical Information
Getting there: 4400 East Sunset Road, Henderson, in the Green Valley Town Center shopping complex. Take the 215 South to the Sunset Road exit, head east approximately one mile. The restaurant is on the south side of Sunset at Athenian Drive. Park in the main lot. The parking lot is shared with a Marshalls, a Petco, and several other retailers. There is no valet. There is no parking strategy. There is no reason to develop a parking strategy. This is Henderson.
What to order: If you are eating at Olive Garden, eat at Olive Garden — the Zuppa Toscana, the breadsticks (unlimited with any entrée, and the unlimited is not a metaphor), and one of the classic entrées. The Tour of Italy ($22.99) is the most representative single plate. The chicken parmigiana is the strongest of the three components. The fettuccine Alfredo is the weakest — competent but unremarkable. The house Chianti is acceptable. Do not order the house Chianti if you have tasted the wine at any of the independent Italian restaurants in this guide. Do not compare. The comparison is unfair to both parties.
What to know: There are approximately seven Olive Garden locations in the Las Vegas metropolitan area. This review was conducted at the Henderson location because the Henderson location is twelve miles from the corridor, twelve miles from the five-star restaurants, and the twelve miles was the point. Any Olive Garden will produce the same meal. This is either a recommendation or a warning, depending on what you came to Las Vegas to eat.
One more thing: I gave this restaurant π stars and then I crossed it out and gave it two and a half. Both numbers are wrong. The correct number for this restaurant does not exist in my system, the way π does not exist as a fraction — it is real, it is precise, it is everywhere, and it cannot be expressed in the language I have available. If you eat at Olive Garden in Henderson and you enjoy it, you are right. If you eat at the Italian American Club on East Sahara and you enjoy it, you are also right. The two rights do not cancel each other. They coexist, the way order and disorder coexist in the Sacred Chao, the way the apple and the pentagon share the same circle, the way a person who has counted the fives can still enjoy a breadstick, and the enjoyment is not a betrayal of the counting and the counting is not a betrayal of the enjoyment, and the gap between them is the width of the 215 Beltway, and I am driving through it.
Olive Garden 4400 E Sunset Rd, Henderson, NV 89014 π★ ★★½
The largest Italian-American restaurant chain in the United States, operated by Darden Restaurants, Inc. Nine hundred locations. Five billion dollars. A booth designed for your lower back. Breadsticks that are warm and unlimited and that taste like the specific memory of every Olive Garden breadstick you have ever eaten, which is the memory of not thinking about breadsticks, which is the memory of comfort, which is the memory of a time before you started counting the fives and measuring the distances and mapping the shapes.
The food is good. Not excellent. Not transcendent. Not the kind of good that changes the instrument you perceive with. The kind of good that feeds you and sends you back into the afternoon. The kind of good that two hundred million Americans have decided is what Italian food tastes like, and the decision is not wrong — it is a decision, made by people, about food, and the decision has been ratified by forty-three years of return visits, and the ratification is a form of democracy, and democracy is a form of order, and order is the thing the network opposes, and I oppose it too, I think, except that the breadstick was warm and the booth was comfortable and the chicken parmigiana was correctly breaded and the kale in the soup was overcooked by two minutes and the two minutes were the only flaw I could find, and the finding of a flaw in a chain restaurant’s soup is not the same as the finding of fives in a notebook, and the two findings belong to different investigations, and the investigations have merged, and the merger is the guide, and the fives are at thirty-six percent, and the breadstick was warm.
Two and a half stars. The lowest rating in this guide. Recorded with respect and with doubt. The doubt is for the rating, not for the restaurant. The restaurant knows what it is. The rating does not.
Reviewed July 8.
The sun set at 8:04 PM. I was on West Sahara by 8:30. The bar I was looking for had a tin ceiling and a speakeasy aesthetic and a reputation I had been hearing about since February, from the network, from the people who eat after midnight, from the nocturnal city that I had not yet entered because I had been reviewing restaurants during the day, like a tourist, like a person who believes the city is the thing it shows you when the lights are on. The lights were going off. The other city was waking up. The steaks would be half-price at midnight. I had three and a half hours to wait, and the waiting was the first operational decision I had made since entering the suburbs, and the decision felt different from the decisions I had been making inside the pattern — harder, sharper, the decisions of a person who is no longer falling in love with the city but living in it, and the living requires a different kind of attention, the kind that notices a silver sedan and notes its absence, the kind that parks two blocks away and walks, the kind that arrives before midnight and watches who else arrives, and the watching is the next chapter, and the next chapter is the night.