Olive Garden Italian Restaurant

I'm a pretty understanding patient person, but coming from a family in the restaurant industry I really need to share how absolutely terrible our lunch experience was today. We typically love Olive Garden, however after today I genuinely do not ever want to come back.

My coworker and I arrived for lunch this afternoon around 11:45am and were told by the host it would be a 5-10 min wait for a table. All good even though it's empty and very obvious there are plenty of tables and servers available, we decided to move to the bar for a faster lunch since we only have an hour typically for break.

We waited at the bar for close to 15 mins to receive any bit of service. Multiple employees walked by and did not once pick up on the very obvious clues we were eagerly waiting to order.

It was quite clear the bartender who was working had much more on his mind, because I had to grab ourselves our own menus from the bar and walk up to another worker to request someone come take our order. Even worse when a customer does finally speak up and employees act annoyed for you bothering them.

It looked to be the manager on duty that did finally come out and take our order. Great, I was okay with the mix up and was ready to move on with hopes of better service. My salad plate came out dirty and when I requested a new one it felt like I was being unreasonable. A clean wet plate was brought to me instead. Seems so simple, but when you are in the wrong would you not just wipe the plate to make sure everything is correct this time? In a situation like that normally you are quite apologetic and make haste to resolve the situation.

The whole environment today was not welcoming and/or helpful.

Food came out - great as always. I requested our checks as we got our food since I was aware of how long it was already taking to receive some attention. Eventually after waiting to receive them and quickly placing our cards out to be processed - we waited another 10+ mins for even just eye contact. The restaurant was not busy. There is absolutely no excuse for service that poor.

We felt entirely ignored. I have never been to a restaurant and felt more of a bother. I don't have one good thing I can say about the service today. Not one smile or apology or sincere act of care was expressed from any of the staff.

I really hope this can be a good reminder to your staff that the smallest bit of attention goes a long way.