Olive Garden Chefs Study in Italy???

Olive Garden’s Chefs Study in Italy???

You have to give the marketing people at Olive Garden credit. They’ve created a classic default dining option by using a massive television campaign that suggests that the customers are party of the “family.” When my children were younger, they demanded that we go to the OG for the unending salad bowl and the bread sticks. Funny, but I never felt like bosom-clutching hugs from some Italian grandma out of central casting were going to be forthcoming. I never really got the “family” thing at all. I also never got the food for that matter.

Now the OG ads are creating the illusion that all their chefs, and I use that word loosely, are being flown to Tuscany in Italy for training on the mother ship, the corporate owned Culinary Institute of Tuscany. That is simply not the case. The chefs do not attend. Out of the 613 Olive Garden restaurants in the US, about 100 managers each year are sent to the Institute for further education in ostensibly learning how to choose the freshest produce, how to perfect al dente and how to layer sauces.

Since the chefs are the people responsible for turning out the food, it would make sense that they should attend as well. I’ve eaten at Olive Gardens where the chefs were so clueless that the concept of al dente might as well have been E=mc2. But given what the average chef probably makes at an Olive Garden, I can’t see corporate picking up the tab for a week overseas for hundreds of them. But don’t expect the huge and misleading TV campaign to end any time soon. To paraphrase PT Barnum, you can fool most of the people just about all of the time if you use enough television.

Mario Batali invades Las Vegas

Noted Food Network luminary and famed NYC restaurateur Mario Batali has opened two new restaurants at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. The first, B&B Ristorante is modeled after his hugely successful Babbo in New York. This is upscale Batali with dishes such as mint love letters with spicy lamb sausage in a “setting that captures the soul of an Italian grandmother dancing the tango with pop rock hipsters.” I’m not sure I can get my culinary imagination squarely around the idea of an Italian grandmother dancing the tango. But I will give it a try and report back to you.

Also opening at the Venetian is Batali’s Enoteca San Marco which is a more casual restaurant featuring homemade salami, gelato, and Italian wines by the quartino.

Other celebrity chefs such as Emeril Legasse have tried restaurants at the Venetian that in my opinion, were not as good as the orginals. Delmonico’s, Legasse’s concept, has been flawed from its inception. And the Venetian’s version of Lutece pales in comparison to the original in New York. But Wolfgang Puck’s Postrio and Thomas Keller’s Bouchon have been terrific. So we’ll see how Batali fares in that caldron of restaurant excess known as Las Vegas.