Posted on 01/25/2012 8:25:29 PM PST by ConservativeStatement
With sales slipping, Olive Garden is trying to win back customers who have fallen out of love with the nation's largest Italian chain.
It is a major challenge for Orlando-based Darden Restaurants, which owns Olive Garden, Red Lobster and other brands.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
According to whitehouseforsale.org, the CEO of Darden Group/Olive Garden, Clarence Otis Jr., donated $28,500 to Obama’s campaign in 2008.
The Olive Garden serves its patrons bread, pasta, and polyunsaturated oils, all of which shorten their lives.
Politically correct dining is Pretty Quick dying.
Lawmaker delays hearing on Darden tax-break bill
March 30, 2011|By Jason Garcia, Orlando Sentinel
TALLAHASSEE — A hearing on a bill that would give Darden Restaurants a tax break of as much as $5 million a year was postponed Wednesday after the sponsor asked for more time to address recent questions about the legislation.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/os-darden-solar-panels-20110822,0,6221415.story
Darden Restaurants to build solar panels
Favored status? That could never happen, could it?
FWIW, lots of Lebanese restaurants going up all over the place here..........
I hate to state the obvious, but their food isn’t really that good.
Clarence Otis Jr., CEO of Darden Restaurants Inc.
That is it. They should have stuck with serving food instead of politics.
Sorry to hear about your illness. Perhaps what I write below will generate more memories.
I grew up in West Whittier and College Hills, attended Walter F. Dexter Junior High School and Whittier High.
We were regular customers at the Wardman Theater as well as the Roxy Theater downtown, the Sundown Drive-in Theater on Washington, and the palatial Whittier Theater on Whittier Blvd. where Sam Cohen, the father of the neutron bomb, used to like to go when he was growing up in Boyle Heights.
For Mexican food, we went to Carillo's in Whittier and the Mt. Baldy in Pico Rivera, which resembled Mt. Baldy. Sometimes we would get over to El Poche in San Gabriel, which was renowned throughout the region. All of these eateries are long gone, but Chris & Pitt's barbecue restaurant in West Whittier, which opened about 60 years ago, is still in business as is Rubi's, a joint that serves excellent burgers, Mexican food and ice cream cones dipped in chocolate sauce, which has been there since the early 1960's.
We shopped at the Box Market on Whittier Blvd., whose owner's name was Box, and at the Buy Fair market, which changed its name every few years, a few blocks to the west. The best place to get meat was the Model Market on Beverly Blvd. For a while, Don Nixon ran Nixon's Market on Whittier Blvd. about a block from his where better-known brother Richard once lived. All of these stores are long gone, but I often shop at the Trader Joe's, located in the old Alpha Beta market in East Whittier.
When we needed a haircut, we went to a barber named Luigi, who was an immigrant from Tuscany and had a shop in a long-gone strip mall on Whittier Blvd.
I also remember some disasters--the fires that destroyed the Whittier News in 1958, Mifflin's Market in 1970, the Roxy Theater in 1971, and the William Penn Hotel in 1979. In 1967, a brush fire scorched 2,000 acres in the Whittier Hills. but the worst disaster to hit the community was the Whittier earthquake of 1987.
The Whittier area may have changed considerably,but it's still a nice place to live.
It is always suprising to see the very large older people who are there dining. (or at least were when I stopped going)
Obvious health problems and obviously eating bad.
BTW do they “recycle” breadsticks which are not used?
Ya know I live in the BBQ capitol of the world, Chris and Pitts will always be my favorite. As long as my parents were alive, they would send us C&P BBQ sauce.
Maria
Prayers lifting my FRiend.
May God bless and keep you.
Tatt
Thanks! Pulmonary Fibrosis
My wife and I were looking for a late lunch a couple of years ago and wandered into a Red Lobster. We were told that it would be a 15 to 20 minute wait and that we could wait in the bar. I looked in the dining room and there was precisely one occupied table. We turned and walked out and haven’t darkened their door again.
Why would anyone go to an Italian restaurant that is really nothing more than fast food with a menu created by chefs sitting next to the beancounters at corporate headquarters in some faraway location? The mass produced food is mostly prepared from canned or frozen pre-processed ingredients and made deliberately bland so as not to offend the culinary challenged who seem to equate quality with quantity.
For every Olive Garden in my area there are dozens of real Italian restaurants serving real Italian food made fresh from whole, unprocessed ingredients based upon recipes that have been passed down from generation to generation (although not necessarily written down). Some of these places are fine dining, but many are small, inexpensive family places that can turn out excellent Itallian food for same or lower price than Olive Garden.
The one i went to was child size portions too. see my post 29
Seriously, we have a wonderful little Mom and Pop Italian Restaurant not far from where I work. The food is fabulous and much more reasonable than Oliver Garden.
Every time I go in, I tell the owner that she should give me some of their menus and let me go hand them out to the people in line at Olive Garden.
She just laughs and gives me an extra big helping of whatever I order.
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