Why Dissing Olive Garden is Class Warfare (or just plain urban snobbery)

First, a quick thanks to my friend Serene for getting me started on this rant in Facebook comments.  If you are at all interested in how feminist philosophers view the world, check out her blog, The Second Shift, and particularly the post about the reality TV show Married at First Sight, here.

And now, on to the rant!

A 294 page slideshow by hedge fund Starboard Value LP slamming Olive Garden has been getting massive play all over the Internet (and the Daily Show, and some of the afternoon news shows, I'm looking at you, MSNBC!) the last couple weeks.  Most of the hedge fund’s criticism focused on restaurant management, unfocused advertising campaigns and poorly executed final food products that look nothing like the glossy menu photos.  Right, like an actual Big Mac looks anything like this.  

I want to go after Starboard’s criticism of Olive Garden for being off base on a number of points that have nothing to do with market analysis and profit margins.  But more importantly, I want to take some of my favorite publications (Slate, HuffPost, The Daily Show) to task for jumping on the Olive Garden bashing bandwagon without doing any critical thinking here.  Largely because every few years it seems to get popular again to slam Olive Garden as inauthentic, unsophisticated, and a cheap knock off of the “real” Italian food one can find in hipper, spendier, urban establishments.  These repeated rounds of criticism grate at my soul for a couple reasons, but mostly it boils down to what Olive Garden represents in rural America and what it means when urban critics take the time to crowingly mock that on grounds that mostly turn out to be unfair. 

Olive Garden, across much of the broad middle of the country, is a nice night out.  An expensive night out to be sure, but one where the value of deals like the “neverending pasta bowl” acts as a counterweight to any lingering feelings of guilt or shame or panic that plague low income Americans when they take their families out somewhere fancy.  These feelings are real, they are constantly in the background, and they suck.  So don’t anybody dare (Starboard, or Slate, or Jon Stewart) gleefully throw shade about how it isn’t really that fancy after all.

No one has really questioned Starboard’s motives here, which is weird, because they are a hedge fund, so probably not pure as the driven snow.  There have even been some naïve (or poorly researched?) assertions that Starboard made this slide show (and is publicizing its criticism) in order to “shame O.G. into improving.”  This is absurd.  Hedge funds make their money from betting on companies failing, or from taking over failing companies, making them fail slightly less (or selling off any non-failing parts), and then selling them.  Why would a hedge fund give a crap if Olive Garden improves for its own sake?  Obviously Starboard must have a stake here.  And, sure enough, if you pry a little further, the hedge fund is engaged in a fight with Darden, the parent company of Olive Garden (and Red Lobster and Longhorn Steakhouses) over control of the company leading up to a big share-holder vote, preceded, conveniently, by all this bad press.  The slide show is Starboard’s takeover pitch, so we can’t really say they are neutral actors just rooting for Olive Garden’s best interests here, they are trying to make Darden look as bad as possible to justify their own investment strategy.

To bolster its argument against Darden, Starboard (and their echoing media critics) go after Olive Garden for being something it was never intended to be.  Starboard’s complaints include:

“Buy one entrée, take one home” and other recent promotions appear to be inconsistent with Italian culture – not to mention the extreme portion size is inconsistent with authentic Italian values and creates enormous waste.

Servers no longer encourage wine with lunch or dinner, even though wine is an authentic part of the Italian family dining experience.

Olive Garden Italian American food.  As I mentioned above, portion size and deals like the never ending pasta bowl are what draws American diners, particularly those in rural areas who cannot afford to eat out except on a few special occasions, to Olive Garden as a value experience.  Starboard is acting like people sit and eat all their endless salad, breadsticks, soup, and pasta in one sitting, ignoring the reality that Americans, unlike Italians, love to take leftovers home.  When you feel like you got two meals for the price of one (even if the price of that one meal for the whole family sets you back a full day’s wages), that value offsets your worries about taking the family out to eat at a greater cost than you’re comfortable with every once in awhile.  Sure, Olive Garden does the whole “our chefs learn their craft in Italy!” thing, but it is obvious they are an Italian American chain restaurant. 

Which is another thing, they are a chain restaurant.  Comparing their franchises to some 120 year old privately owned, handed-down-through-the-generations hole-in-the-wall on Mulberry Street misses the point entirely.  Many of the people who go to Olive Garden will never in their lives get to go to Little Italy.  They do not have regular access to prosciutto and ricotta salata and limoncello in their grocery stores (or in their whole towns, in their whole counties, maybe in the whole state!).  They know that Olive Garden is not an “authentic Italian” experience, but it is a really nice place, maybe the nicest around, to go to celebrate birthdays and promotions and graduations with family.  And even though the cost means you can’t go there all the time, you know you’ll get tons of leftovers when you do go so you don’t feel so bad about spending all that money once in awhile because you get so much value for it.  In my town, one of the only two other Italian restaurants for the last ten years pronounced it EYE-talian, so Olive Garden is pretty authentic for us.

Starboard also dedicates several slides to how Olive Garden’s endless salad and breadsticks are resulting in “waste” for the restaurant.  But if you read carefully, you can see what they are really concerned about is not food waste as we diners would think about it (uneaten salad or breadsticks), but wasted cost, that is, added cost to the restaurant that doesn’t result in added profits.  Yeah, okay, I can see why “endless” anything costs the restaurant money, and I can see why a company wanting to make the restaurant more profitable would recommend paring this back.  But this is also class warfare, let me tell you why.

For example, Starboard argues that only one breadstick per diner, plus one additional breadstick should be placed on the table.  Servers should then ask customers if they want additional breadsticks.  However, this ignores how customers eat at Olive Garden, and how servers operate at most casual restaurants. 

Most people come to the restaurant hungry.  If you are going out for a dinner as expensive (and as I mentioned, in rural areas, this might be the most expensive place around) as Olive Garden, you want to make sure you are hungry enough to take full advantage of the experience.  Hungry people will want to eat a breadstick or two with their salad while they are waiting for their entrée.  At casual dining restaurants, servers check back on diners at natural, but relatively set, intervals.  Shortly after your entrée is served, for example, then again when plates are looking clearer to see if you are thinking about dessert.  Therefore, if you eat one breadstick after you order, then putter at your salad, and there is one breadstick left for the four or five of you at the table, that means most of the people at the table are going to be annoyed.  You then have to flag down your server (because it is not a natural interval for them to have checked back on you already, they just took your order, after all!) and ask for more breadsticks. 

You only want maybe one more breadstick for each person at the table before your entrée comes but because you have to hail someone to ask for it, you feel like a pig!  And because you don’t go out to eat that often, you also feel a little ashamed to be hoovering up the endless breadsticks, which you now have to advertise by publicly waiving your arm around to ask for more.  So what Starboard is really saying is they want Olive Garden to incorporate subtle techniques of shame, intimidation, and manipulation of their diners’ class insecurities to get them to eat fewer breadsticks. 

This will work!  People will eat fewer breadsticks!  But they will also start to feel a little more stressed and resentful and negative about their Olive Garden experience, because nothing is worse than when something than used to be free is now a little less free (just think of checked bags on airplanes!).  But profitability due to decreased salad and breadstick “waste” will probably tick up briefly in the interim just long enough for Starboard to sell Olive Garden and make their own profit.  Ahem, hedge funds.

The criticism that has received the most attention, however, is Starboard’s accusation that Olive Garden has stopped salting its pasta water in order to obtain a longer warranty on its pots.  In a headline typical of the brouhaha this revelation has stirred up, Slate declared “Olive Garden Has Been Committing A Culinary Crime Against Humanity.”  

I would love to be able to say that Slate is intentionally using an absurdly hyperbolic title in order to mock Starboard, rather than mocking Olive Garden, but the article makes it clear that this isn’t the case.  Prominently featured just under the opening lines is the Starboard slide stating that Olive Garden has “lost its Italian heritage and authenticity.”  Pause for a minute: its “Italian heritage”? Seriously?  How can we think for a minute that Starboard is doing anything but pursuing an agenda here.  Slate goes on to inform readers of how necessary salting the pasta water is.  It is so necessary in fact that the article originally misstated why it is necessary.  The admonition “For the non-home cooks out there, salting water is essential for correctly flavoring pasta,” is followed by an ominous asterisk.  The Correction note states: “This post originally misstated that salting water helps pasta cook correctly by increasing the liquid's boiling point. Despite the dearly held beliefs of many home cooks, adding a moderate amount of salt does not significantly change the temperature at which water boils.”  Clearly, salting the water is a vital step…for some reason.

The Huffington Post is similarly confused about this supposedly indispensable step in one of the most basic processes in American (ahem, Italian) cooking.  Do you salt the water when it is cold or when it is hot?  Or after it is boiling?  Do you need to salt the pasta when you are salting the sauce?  Do you use enough salt to raise the boiling point of the water and make the brine taste like the sea?  Or is that too salty and you should instead use measuring spoons to get the amount just right?  The only consensus seems to be that we’re probably doing it wrong.  Also, apparently you can’t use iodized salt, which I’d bet a lot of us had in our pantries growing up, before sea salt was available in a grinder from Costco.  Does this mean the pasta of our childhoods always tasted “metallic” as the HuffPost claims?

Now, I’m not saying that Olive Garden shouldn’t be salting its pasta water.  It is the traditional way to do it and it does season the pasta as it cooks.  But I wouldn’t really put it on the level of a culinary crime against humanity either.  I imagine like any restaurant, their other ingredients, including their rich sauces, already contain high sodium levels, so I doubt, flavor-wise, that it makes much of a difference whether the pasta is salted or not.  A non-chef could probably only tell if you were eating the plain noodles (and who would go out to Olive Garden to eat plain noodles?).  The fact that the very critics who are supposedly so aghast that Olive Garden has flubbed the first step in Cooking Pasta 101 have such difficulty articulating what, exactly, that first step entails (beyond putting some type of salt into the water at some point in the process), suggests water salting, like many steps in authentic Italian cooking, may have more to do with tradition (and superstition), like throwing a little over your shoulder after you’ve tossed some in the pot (all home cooks do that too, right?  Or is it just us Italians?).

So rather than taking such delight in coming down on Olive Garden (and by extension all of us who still hold it in high esteem), for not being authentic enough, or Italian enough, and for being too generous (and isn’t generosity an authentically Italian – and Italian American – trait?) with portions and breadsticks, I would ask these critics who take their urban settings for granted to consider those of us who can’t pick up a hand-tossed roasted fig, prosciutto and gorgonzola pizza with balsamic reduction on the way home from work any day of the week.  For many of us rural folks, the opportunity to eat out and get anything approaching Italian food at a value point we can afford is a rarity we are grateful for.  Don’t make fun.