Olive Garden Italian Restaurant — Restaurant in Shreveport

Horrible Experience We should have turned around and walked out after being greeted by the horrible smell when you enter the front door...it’s smells like a dirty bar area, drains or the floors have been mopped with a sour mop. This was just the beginning. The hostess was very nice and we were seated promptly. After 4-5 minutes of waiting, the server (who speaks very low, so low you can barely understand) finally arrived to take our drink order and we went ahead and gave our appetizer order as well. After several minutes, she brought our drinks to the table and took our food order...we kept it simple, Soup & Salad...or so we thought! She asked if we wanted the soup & Salad together or if we wanted the salad first, we said salad first. A few minutes later she arrived with our appetizer, soup and bread sticks...no salad. After that, she disappeared for the longest! We ate our appetizer and our first bowl of soup...waited, waited, by this time we were out of drinks as well...completely empty table for about 10 minutes. She finally came back, we inquired about our salad, asked for more soup and drinks as she was walked away from us while we were talking! She came back with soup, salad & drinks...progress, except no salad plates!! I asked for them, she never returned. After we finished our second soup we finally asked another server for salad plates...the look on his face was priceless, like he couldn’t believe someone didn’t leave us salad plates. He brought them to us quickly! Thank you!! We finished our salad and once again, awkward moment..dirty plates, no food and drink glasses empty...again, a long wait. We really wanted another soup & Salad, but our frustration got to us. She finally came back and asked if we were okay...I was not rude, but firm in expressing my disappointment and I asked for our check. She apologized and truly acted shocked that we thought our service was horrible??? Really?? We tried to pay on the little machine, and like our neighboring tables, we had issues and she had to run our card the “old way”. She was gone for a while with my card, when she came back, she had 2 to-go soups for us...nice gesture, but to late..our appetite was gone from the frustration, so we left them on the table with our signed receipt and the gratuity, yes I left a gratuity. While she was gone, another sever saw the frustration on our faces and came to check on us, we didn’t elaborate, just said we’ve had a horrible experience and we want to leave. She apologized. The what I assume was a manager wearing a khaki colored shirt & an ear piece was more concerned talking to the wait staff vs. checking on customers. I assume the server said something to the manager about our experience, they did comp our appetizer, but didn’t tell us...I noticed on the receipt...

My first visit back since the pandemic and oh boy what a mess it was. Food was par for the course, as one would expect from an olive garden. Certainly not fresh made that day or anything extravagant like that, but perfectly edible and enjoyable. The endless pasta bowl is back, but the options this time around were fairly slim. No ravioli, or tortellini. Just basic spaghetti or ziti. The price got bumped up to 13$ a serving, witch isn't bad on it's own. But if you want anything like meatballs or the like on your basic pasta, that adds another five dollars to the bowl's cost. That and a drink and your paying 25$ a head. Very pricey for such cheap quality pasta. Truth be told that wasn't even the part I would complain about. Throughout our meal we must have had three or four servers waiting on our table, yet getting drinks refilled or the pasta bowls refilled took forever. I know that they probably space the pasta refills out to give you time to fill up so you don't order as many, but the drinks?! C'mon! You should want to fill those with that logic! Not only that but after we finally finished our meal the server came by and asked if we needed anything else, we said just the check. They took over twenty minutes to return, and only after we had done everything shy of getting up and walking around to find them to get their attention (like use the call server button on the kiosk thing) they came back and seemed to be annoyed, asking what we wanted, and we had to remind them we were waiting to pay! tldr; Service was dreadful. One of the four servers that helped us was an absolute delight. Everyone else didn't seem like they wanted to be there, or outright seemed annoyed they needed to check on us more than once a visit. I'm probably not going to be eating here again for some time, if not for the terrible service, the price and wait alone for decent-at-best pasta. It's not fully written off yet. But it will take some convincing to come back any time soon. To all who might be thinking of it, it's not terrible so long as you don't mind long waits and overpaying for mediocre pasta. Free bread sticks bumps the rating up for me, but not enough to clear a third star. Strong...

We had a party of 7 people, which is not a great deal of folks, but enough to apparently extend a 15min wait to a 45min wait. There were plenty of tables, but few wait staff (probably because of the nature of the restaurant industry and its proclivity for having workers call in sick). The wait in the lobby was absolutely unacceptable. I understand that when you're busy, there's nothing you can do to prevent long wait times. However, it's up to the host staff to make prospective customers aware of actual wait times. If we had known that the true wait time was actually an hour or so, we would have chosen a different restaurant.

Also, the host staff sat us down with no kids' menus. After waiting 15 minutes for our drink orders, we kindly reminded them to bring kids menus. Luckily, the kids had an idea of what they wanted to eat. What it boils down to is the that the host staff sensed my frustration, and their solution to placate my frustration was to seat us earlier than what wait staff was prepared for.

When the breadsticks and salad arrived, the breadsticks were cold. Also, we're aware that the breadsticks are not made in-house, but there was a definite lingering aftertaste of freezer burn. If you've ever had a store-bought pizza that tasted weird, you know exactly the aftertaste I'm talking about.

When our entres arrived, they were also cold. Overall, it was a very frustrating ordeal.

The waitress was great considering the issues she was facing. We left a 25% tip.

The problems we faced are a direct reflection of management's inability to manage a restaurant and ignorant host staff. Management was not assisting servers, nor were they helping the front-end. I understand that in busy times, there is an expectation to wait a little longer for service, but longer than expressed wait times, no kids menus, long drink orders, and cold food is not indicative of a bad kitchen or bad wait staff. It is indicative of...