Olive Garden Italian Restaurant — Restaurant in Boston

I have been working in the restaurant industry for 20 years in every position from dishwasher to General Manager and Olive Garden needs to seriously reassess what they are doing at their South Bay location. First, we entered the building at 1:40 p.m. and were greeted by a group of girls who did not say hi and we're not smiling, they just asked "how many?". We told them 5 and they quoted us a 10 to 20 minute wait. No problem. While waiting and looking around, it was clear that no one there was enjoying their job. Not one person on the staff showed any sense of urgency and no one was smiling! All 3 hostesses looked miserable and were way more worried about their own conversation than any of the guests entering the building. Once we were finally seated after waiting 30 minutes, we were ignored for another 10 minutes until a manager (blonde female, I didn't get her name) came out of the kitchen and immediately noticed we were not being attended to. She was very nice (the only positive of our experience)! She took our beverage order, brought them over and then took our food order. She was accommodating to my girlfriend's dietary needs and was happy to get her something she could eat. Unfortunately once she brought over our salad we never saw her again and the waiter that ignored us for the first ten minutes took over. He delivered our meals and refilled our children's drinks and then we never saw him again either. No one stopped back over to check to see how our meal was tasting, which was underwhelming at best. 3 of the 5 entrees were clearly sitting under the heat lamp for some time as my girlfriend's food was cold, my Shrimp Scampi had a layer of "skin" over the top and the sauce on my daughters spaghetti was the same way, in fact that had to have been finished first and in the window for some time considering there was some sauce literally crusted to the plate. We finished our meals and waited again for at least 5 minutes for someone to acknowledge we were finished, but no one did. Thankfully I was able to view how much our check was on the table top device. The bill came to $47 and change so I left a $50 bill on the table and we walked out. No one said anything to us on the way out, which didn't surprise me one bit at this point. In fact I'm pretty sure had we not paid, no one would have even noticed! We went into the South Bay mall thinking of going to Applebee's until we noticed Olive Garden right next door and decided to go there because of a good experience we had at a different location in the past. I have to say I seriously regret switching our decision, wish we went...

Very Horrible and Disappointing experience. On Friday October 17,2015 myself and my 4 sisters went to Olive Garden to Celebrate one of my sisters Birthday. When we arrive there, the wait was a hour and a half long. When we were finally seated it took the waiter about 15 minutes to greet us, when he finally came he did not suggest any wine or offered any complinentary taste; that was dissapointing because we were all considering having a glass of wine. When we all placed our orders the food came out cold, I had the Herb Grilled Salmon, the birthday girl had the Steak gorgonzola and my other sister had a Chicken flatbread. When my Salmon came out there was no broccoli in the plate, I told my waiter and he took the plate back to the kitchen and came back 3 seconds later with Cold uncooked brocolli on my plate. I felt majorly insulted because it was obvious that they just didn't care . The birthday girls food was cold and the Steak was under cooked. My other Sister's chicken on her flat bread was Cold. None of us ate any food that night , luckily salad and bread sticks are offered or else we would have left starving. The Manager did come over, she appologized and offered to comp each meal and remake it to take home. However, by the time we received each meal they were made worse than the first ones. I asked for the Manager again and was told she went home, I was very upset about that because as a Manager i feel you should show some empathy for you Guests by making sure they have the best experience. the least she could have done is stick around and make sure we were taken care of properly. We all ended up throwing away our food, they were cold, dry, undercooked and just plane uneatable. I feel really bad because I was the one who suggested Olive Garden for my sister's birthday and it ended up being the worst dining experience ever. I feel disrespected and unapreciated as a guest at...

Singlehandedly the weirdest experience I’ve ever had - weird enough that we actually got up and left before our drinks came. The restaurant had a bad vibe from the start; upon walking in it genuinely smelled like fecal matter, feet, and cheese, all combined into one. This smell left me without much appetite, but the experience after being seated at our table really sealed the deal. We sit down, read the menus for a while. Then some young black guy with locs comes up and asks us if we’ve moved. We reply no, he asks us again if we moved and why we are sat there. We give a description of the guy who sat us there, and he again is weirdly insistent on us moving tables, even though the restaurant is practically vacant. He eventually goes away, then comes back asking us the same stuff again and acting odd. At this point we’re tired of being harassed and agree to get up, carrying our menus and cutlery to another table for seemingly no reason. So we sit down, albeit extremely confused at this point. Then a Latina girl wearing glasses comes and asks us what drinks we want. We reply water. She gives a confused face like she has never heard of water being available at a restaurant before. She asks us again, and we say water. She looks confused again. She asks ‘soft drinks?’. No. Water. She still seems extremely confused that we want water. So she goes off and we decide at that point we’d had enough. Not only did the staff seem like they had zero communication between them, with random side characters popping up every second, but they all seemed spaced out, so I’m not sure if they were on something? Nonetheless it was an extremely weird experience, so weird that it was almost comedic. The one star is for the fire truck we got to see before we went in after the staff called it out on a random guy sitting outside. The firemen seemed as confused as the guy did as to what they were called...