Olive Garden Italian Restaurant — Restaurant in Leesburg

Oh boy. It's been a minute since I've left a review. I only do so when I feel the need. This is one of those times.

Olive Garden in Leesburg, Fl. You should join your neighbor, Red Lobster, in closing down. At least they had the dignity and wherewithal to close before losing their self respect. You, on the other hand, are still open, which might as well be one of the mysteries of the world.

Let the review begin:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...no, who am I kidding. Olive Garden sucks". - Frank M

My wife and decide to drive 20 minutes to Olive Garden, which we will call them OG for the sake of this interview. We were pretty hungry and wanted some amazing mediocre Italian food and OG is the place for that. To be honest, all we wanted was breadsticks and salad, but I digress. As we walked in, we noticed the atmosphere was very quiet and calm, which is exactly what we wanted. Of course, it was quiet and calm because there were only about four tables currently sitting, but I digress once again.

We asked for a booth for two, where the very official hostess with her equally important-looking tablet informed us that we would have to wait five minutes to have a booth cleaned. Weird but ok. Those tablets are pretty good babysitters and have taken away the process of thought and critical thinking. IF THE TABLET SAYS THEY WAIT FIVE MINUTES EVEN THOUGH THERE IS A WHOLE BUILDING FULL OF BOOTHS, MAKE THEM WAIT. George Orwell would be proud.

So we wait the requisite five minutes when the tablet Overseer gave the hostess the ok to seat us. We were sat in an area that had five booths, all in the space of a decent master bedroom, with two booths already sat. My first thought was, "why did they make us wait five minutes when there are three booths available"? I immediately shook those thoughts off, as I don't want to be arrested for a "thoughtcrime".

Of course the booth table we get sat at is at a slant. Literally you could put the salt shaker on its side and it would roll off. It was like the Leaning Table of Piss-a. Would have been fun to put some plastic down, oil it up and watch small wild animals slide off like it was a slip 'n slide. My wife was a bit perturbed by the table angle. What if she dropped a meatball, it would roll off, or I may drop a penne, and it would roll like a stone gathering no moss. Since there was a booth available literally three feet away, and its table was level, we decided to move to that table. We let our server know and when we did, you would have thought we asked her to define Pi to the 13th decimal. She let us know she would have to ask if that's ok. My wife said "no" we were moving anyway, which we did. Rather deflated, and probably somewhat confused, like a liberal when I ask what good Kamala has done in her entire life besides....sorry. I digress.

After a slight discussion, my wife and I decide to leave. We decided to take another thirty minute drive to Bone Fish in The Villages, where the tables are level, service is good, and the food is inviting. We knew we would not be having a good meaL at the OG. We wanted mediocre Italian food, not less than mediocre food that rolls off the table.

To conclude this review, oh my brothers, I have to ask, why the sudden downturn of customer service? Are we to blame Covid, Gen Z (my vote, skibidi), the current political atmosphere? When did critical thinking and customer service lose sight of each other? Since when is a three foot distance between booths a cause to make people wait five minutes? I don't know, but OG (Only Gag-fans) sucks and I look for them to go the way of the Do-do...and I don't...

I hate to give such a bad rap to a decent restaurant but unfortunately they missed the mark this time. That being said, the food was actually very good. We hadn't been back to this restaurant for probably a year or more. We usually prefer to do local mom and pop restaurants but a friend wanted to go there. Salad was good as usual. However, I ordered marinara sauce but was served meat sauce. Not that that was a big deal because I got meatballs also and it still tasted good. Do I must say there wasn't as much meat as I would have expected from a meat sauce. But the sauce itself was very good. But here's where some of the issues came in. Our order was taken and a timely manner. The salad was brought in a timely matter along with grated cheese. We were never offered any ground pepper, nor was there any salt and pepper on any of the tables near us though later on our way out I did see that some of them had those small grinders on the table. A kitchen runner brought our food so I didn't notice until he left that I had meat sauce and our waitress never came back until our meal was done. She never checked on us even though she was pleasant. That's part of her job. All of us only ordered water so we didn't have to worry much about refills. But what made matters worse was one of our friends ordered the soup and salad combo for his dinner. Well his salad was part of our group salad so there was no issue there. But when they brought out our three entrees they never brought his soup. We thought maybe the runner was coming back with it but he did not. Our waitress never showed up for us to even tell her she never even came in our little alcove section. We flagged down what appeared to be a manager and he remedied the situation right away. Now. I would have asked him for some seasonings but as it turned out i didn't end up needing them but that wasn't really the point it should be available or at least offered. By the time she did come back everybody was now done and our friend did not end up needing a refill on his soup or his salad. We actually had the manager also get us some extra breadsticks because our waitress never came back until the very end. We did order one dessert item to split between us so she was available for that. In fact, we would have asked for a bag to take home the couple that were left but after the bill was paid on one of those kiosks she never returned and we sat there at least 15 minutes. Just chatting and she never checked on if we had any issues with the billing or if we needed anything else before we left. In fact, there was a slight billing problem, but we just remedied it ourselves because we weren't going to ask for a manager again. Now. I'd love to think that I would be able to go back to Olive garden, but I would be a little bit leery about staff paying attention to their customers. By the way, she was very nice. I'm not going to give her name. We went yesterday. The manager that did help out was on top of any issues that we had. Maybe the next time we go we'll have a better...

Unfortunately had a terrible experience today. My family and I truly love Olive Garden and have come to these Olive Garden chains for years. We had a great server Mo who was very patient with us and extremely attentive and had no problem to get us new silverware when majority of our utensils were still dirty. However, the dirty utensils turned out to be the least of our issues. My fiance and I ordered 2 plates of the same pasta and he found a hair in his pasta and the hair in the pasta didn’t even turn out to be the actual issue. We were disappointed of course but just let our server Mo know and he immediately went to get us another plate. The manager Olivia came by and let us know that they would take my fiancé’s plate off of our tab which we did not expect but of course appreciated. It took a little while to get the fixed plate so by the time they came to the table we wanted it to go because we were ready to go home and asked for the bill. By the time the bill came out my fiance paid and realized he paid more than would be expected considering we were told the plate of pasta that had the hair in it would be taken off. I asked for a copy of the receipt and noticed that there were 3 charges for the pasta and 1 was taken off, however we only ordered his pasta and mine so with the messed up pasta being taken off the tab as we were told he still paid for both of our pastas. When we asked about this we were told word for word “we added a third pasta and comped it for you”. Which meant we still paid for the pasta we were told would be free. My fiance truly did not care for the charges but after the terrible experience of everything I felt there was no reason why we should pay for the pasta that had hair in it even though it was remade for us but my fiance no longer had his appetite which was understandable and it took so long for the remake that we were ready to go. On top of everything, to get this error fixed was about a 30 minute ordeal. By this time the manager Olivia seemed frustrated by the situation and had no remorse or care just pretty much wanted to get us out of there, which is understandable I could see how our table was an inconvenience but the entire experience was an inconvenience to us. Dirty utensils, hair in the food and a messed up receipt that was unfortunately already paid for so we needed to get the refund for the original payment and pay the new and correct receipt and as we all know refunds can take up to however many days depending on your bank. However at the end of it all I wasn’t mad about the hair or the dirty utensils I was upset by how the receipt had this mistake, how long it took to get it taken care of and how we were looked at as the issue and how the manager Olivia did not apologize about the receipt error. I have been to multiple Olive Garden chains but this chain in leesburg I would never recommend. We had a terrible experience at...