Olive Garden Italian Restaurant — Restaurant in Macon

What a great staff they have at this location! From the minute I walked in, Autumn (the Mgr on Duty) and Sandy greeted me with a smile and complimented me on my light-up mask and that was just the beginning of a night of wonderful customer service and professionalism. After being seated, Ryan came to the table and introduced himself as my server. He had a very positive attitude, a genuine smile on his face, and a personality that you could tell was naturally outgoing. I explained to him that I was waiting on a friend and would just take a water for now and would order more once my friend showed up. He was totally ok with that. While still waiting on my friend, Ryan came over to inform me that he was being "cut" and that Lesley would be taking over as my server. He was still very positive and smiling when he told me this and asked if I needed anything else before he left. When he walked off, he went to inform one of his other tables that he was being cut. I overheard him laughing and joking with them and thought: "He definitely has the ideal personality for a server." After my friend arrived, Lesley came over to introduce herself and from the moment she came over I could tell she was going to be one of those REALLY good servers and one whose personality meshed well with the joking personalities of my friend and I. Over the next hour and a half, Lesley became like family to us! She cut up with us, let us tease her, told us about her family, and we talked to her about our jobs and lives. She is definitely one of those rare jewels that doesn't come along often in the customer service industry. The food was fantastic, but I honestly feel the experience of meeting her was the true highlight of the night! In addition to Lesley and the others I've already mentioned, I also would like to give recognition to Joe. Joe wasn't even our server, but each time he walked by our table and the other table he passed on his way to the back, he always stopped and smiled and asked if we needed anything and then he would ask the other table the same thing. This is rare among servers. Most servers are solely focused on their tables and don't have the time or patience to be concerned with other tables. The fact that he did this EACH time he walked past our table and the neighboring table says a lot about not only his excellent customer service, but also his character as a person! In addition, each time I walked past the hostess stand on my way to the bathroom or out to my car to get something, Autumn and Sandy always smiled and asked if I needed anything. Without a doubt, the best restaurant experience I have ever had, and I have been back since then and brought a different friend who also thoroughly...

Seated immediately at 3PM for late lunch/early dinner. Have wanted some minestrone soup for ages! Wife never had it but wanted to try mine; said it was “ok” - boy was she almost right, it was no where near enough in the positive direction to be “ok”. It was cold when served, had very little (almost none) liquid, about 4 chunks of cheap yellowish-red tomatoes, a few beans and some pasta. I last had this in an Olive Garden ages ago and it was soooooooo good! The appetizer, shrimp fritto misto was good, but it too was, at best, room temperature. When we initially sat down the waiter, Josh, asked if we wanted drinks from the bar, and so we ordered one each. Well, in just a few minutes the bread and salad were on the table, immediately followed by the shrimp appetizer. When that was finished Josh popped by and I asked about our drinks, to which he said he would check on them. He came back in a few and said @the bartender is getting on them right away (this is 15-20 minutes after ordering them). The big salad bowl had 3 slices of tomato, 2 ripe olives, about a 1/4 cup scoop of croutons, and a ton of really white iceberg lettuce - it also looked rather old. A few minutes later Josh came by and I asked about the drinks, he said, “yeah, I was wondering too, I’ll go check on them”. Well, the drinks were delivered very shortly before we were finished. My wife tried hers and pushed it aside. I removed the ice from my already watered-down “margarita” to find about 3-4 tablespoons of liquid that had no very distinct taste at all (yes, I did drink it to see what it really was - tasted NO TEQUILA AT ALL). As the waiter was removing the dishes from the table he said, “I’ll bring that bread right out to you”, to which I said that it was too late, the meal was finished and besides you offered it some time ago (the place had only a smattering of customers and was deadly quiet - THEY COULD NOT HAVE BEEN BUSY. I was appalled when presented with the bill and asked the waiter to take the drinks off. He said he’d have to ask the manager who immediately tuned me out after taking my wife’s off and saying she couldn’t remove mine because I drank it (ok, I’ll give’em that one). However this woman was not interested in hearing our complaints about “her” restaurant, but opted to tell me about her short-staffing problems. Bless his heart, Josh seemed absolutely lost in trying to serve 2 tables - he is either very new or waiting tables is not his destiny! I’ll not darken their, or any other Olive Garden,...

The service was great and the food was great as well along with the atmosphere. But however the all you can eat garlic breadsticks were brick hard. Asked for a second basket and 2 of those 6 were soft like they were fresh and had not been sitting in a hot warmer all night. The main showcase of this establishment is the bar and seating area of the bar had stuff (not sure what it was) on the top of it. It was not clean by any stretch of the imagination. We dined for a little over an hour and not 1 person sat at the bar and even though there was a bar tender, they lounged around and did not bother taking a towel to the bar top and cleaning it. The other thing about the bar was that all the spirits had paper cone cups on top of the pour spouts. This is done to keep the fruit flies and gnats from "getting in the bottles with the pour spouts on them." It is also a good trap for the same flying insects to get in and only get to those spouts and not out of or away from and it looked slightly discouraging as far as ordering a mixed drink or cocktail. And we didn't order any for just that reason.

Now when we sat down, I was starving and so I ordered appetizers and a main course dish. The silverware was brought out rolled up in fancy cloth napkins. Each one of these napkins stunk like they had been sitting next to a deep fryer that hadn't been cleaned for a few months. The lingering aroma of the cloth was on the silverware as well. I cleaned my silverware off with my shirt to get the stench off it. And then my hands stunk like the foul smell...

Now when the Olive Garden was over off of Mercer University, I never experienced that stench on the cloth napkins, nor did I see paper cone cups on the tops of the spirits bottles. I would think if a place is going to consider them selves as a upper class establishment, they should have better cleaning techniques and fire who ever washes their cloth napkins and hire a company that can provide a cleaner fragrance or use paper napkins. I didn't hardly eat all my food after smelling this. And it wasnt just mine, it was the...