Olive Garden Italian Restaurant — Restaurant in Goldsboro

First off, let me say I usually don't write reviews.. With that said, we go the OG often, probably more than we should. So we got there, and he was a little slow getting to our table. This was no biggie. We ordered a calamari on the little computer, and it takes a while for it to come out..again no biggie. He comes takes our order, we get drinks and then nothing for a while, then finally our salad comes and he says more bread is on the way except we never got any to begin with. When we finally got the bread, it was so soggy from the butter, it was killed with the garlic salt and it was all mushed together with the napkin. It had so much butter that the napkin he wrapped around it was yellow. My 9 year old tried a peperoncino from the salad and was hot and he was already out of tea, we asked for a refill for him and let him know he ran out of drink trying the peperoncino. That was another 5 minutes waiting on that. Obviously, we gave my son some of ours to help him out until his came. Then we finally get the food and my wife ran out of her unsweetened tea, she asked for a refill and he says unsweet tea right? We said yes and he leaves. After a few minutes he comes back with sweet tea..not what she asked for. He brought our youngest son a refill, not the one who had the peperoncino, a large glass of tea, instead of filling his kid cup. The entire time of this meal, my wife is piling dirty dishes in the middle of the table to clear out some space. We boxed our food and the ladies at the front were nice and gave us a bag for our food. This was a horrible experience. We were patient with the whole situation because I had worked for Olive Garden in the past for 9 years in Virginia and in Texas, and my wife was a server for them for 18 years on and off in Virginia and Texas as well. The food was good and prepared the way it was ordered, so I guess that was the...

We only went because we had a gift card that we wanted to go ahead and use. After getting our soup, we finally got our drinks which stayed empty most of the time. We tried the “Create Your Own Lasagna” which was really expensive after adding a sauce and meat to it for very small portions. The kiosk at our table didn’t take our gift card and a manager finally came to our table to discuss the gift card after we had waited for over 20 minutes to pay our bill. When I went to try to find out MIA waitress, a majority of the staff were standing around, some on and off of the clock, doing nothing! Our waitress finally reappeared and seemed to have an attitude when questioned by her coworkers as to where she had been for so long. The food was less than average and after the wait and service and trouble with the stupid kiosk, we won’t be back. Too expensive to be this bad! Edited to say: The manager came to the table to say that part of the numbers were missing from our gift card and we could not use it. “You can call the number on the back yourself...” so we had to pay for our entire meal rather than use our gift card as planned. Again, this was the whole reason we went. We paid our bill and even tipped our waitress. The card thing wasn’t her fault but the lack of service was. Still we paid and then the manager had the nerve to bring us a gift card and said he hoped we would return. The gift card amount was not even half of the one we were trying to use or our bill that we paid out of pocket. We won’t be using the gift card, won’t be returning, and we will be following up on the gift card that he didn’t take the time...

In May of 2025, my brother was visiting from out of state and we decided to go to the local Olive garden. We didn't realize it was as late as it was. It was 15 minutes until closing time. When we walked in we saw wide eyes like oh heck someone's coming in this late will be working overtime! But they seated us! And took our order pleasantly. We both had the chicken linguini with broccoli, and of course the salad. Everything tasted wonderful? Their linguine sauce was excellent. Not overly spiced with garlic. I did not get asked if we wanted a refill on our beverage. And our waitress was very busy getting her station ready to close but she did keep popping in on us. I did feel a little rushed and my brother always eats as quick as he can lol. Other than not coming back to give us a refill on our beverage I'd say the waitress was very pleasant and not pushy to get us out. We did stop our dinner and ask for takeout containers to not keep them to late. I took off a star because we were not asked for beverage refills, because of the atmosphere of the rushed pace, and it was noisy. I believe you can do your job quickly without being loud especially in a restaurant of their caliber. It had been so long since I had been there I had forgotten how good the food was. I...