Olive Garden Italian Restaurant — Restaurant in Tampa

In the three decades of eating at Olive Garden locations, I have never had as bad of an experience as we had at dinner tonight. Starting from the beginning of our meal when our salads came out without any dressing to our entrees coming out incorrectly to later being serving soggy food, it was a masterclass in How Not to Treat Your Customers. Unclear if our server was overwhelmed by the four tables he was serving or if it was his first day on the job, but a few tips: (1) Don’t blame the back of the house staff for the food being incorrect when you bring it to the table. You should have checked before you brought it out. (2) We shouldn’t have to flag down the hostess and other servers to have these issues addressed - you should have come by to see how we were doing. (3) When we let you know the salad was missing ANY dressing and we were waiting to eat it, bring out a pitcher of dressing immediately. Instead, you chose to serve the other tables all of their appetizers and then brought a bowl of dressing and no spoon? (4) When one of the three entrees we were splitting between four were wrong, why would you leave two on the table and take the third back to fix? You didn’t bring us plates to split the food out on so the first two entrees would get cold by the time the fixed one came out. And to add insult to injury, the first two entrees were completely soggy by the time the third entree was corrected and brought out. (5) We didn’t want it anyway, but you didn’t actually ask us if we wanted dessert. And then we didn’t get our after dinner Andes mints until I went up to the hostess to ask. (6) Poor form not to bring water refills to your customers until asked.

Also, I get that the server for the table next to us wasn’t our server but she only had two tables and clearly had time to chat up a storm with the people at the table next to us. No need for her to have an attitude when I asked her to flag down our overwhelmed server a couple times.

And yes, I worked in restaurants and other food service jobs for many years. Nothing we asked for was unreasonable or off menu. We would have just liked to receive the food we ordered properly cooked at the appropriate intervals for a...

We arrived at Olive garden around 8:15pm, Saturday October 8, 2016. A party of 2 adults and 4 kids, (10 and under.) We had to wait about 15 minutes for our table since Olive garden was recovering from a recent swamping of patrons who just left. This created a little additional time in the wait for our table and even longer for our food later on.

Alysa was our waitress and she was outstanding. She kept up with the typical demands of a table of 6 better than most would these days. We didn't need to ask for any refills on our waters. We did ask for a salad with no onions, no tomatoes and no pepperoncinnis, but the salad came with them anyways. The gnocchi soup was fantastic.

The drinks, soup and salad were promptly served. It did entirely take too long for our entree though. We were told multiple times our food will be right out but each time came with another "it will be right out" a few minutes later....It was like a corporate standard and canned answer you would hear from a politician.

Before our meal arrived we were surrounded by 2 tables of loud speaking kids chaperoned by one adult. They were alternating between English and a foreign language and were too loud for us to have a conversation among my own table. There were plenty of other areas to place them- away from other people but Olive Garden decided to stack everyone on top of each other instead.

Meal came out at 1 hour time-frame, the mozzarella cheese on some of the chicken parms were inconsistently applied. Some on one piece and almost none on other.

We didn't have any knives to cut our food.

The chicken looked and tasted more like freezer food than fresh. No grated cheese was offered on the entrees.

After that long wait, we didn't get the sense it was all worth it- because it really wasn't worth the 80 dollars.

No dinner mints came after meal either.

If you are a military family- This Olive Garden does NOT offer a Military discount..

Again, great service by Alysa, but the restaurant itself was not so great today. We will be hesitant...

A couple weeks ago, my coworker and I were craving Olive Garden. It was a last minute plan so we got seated at 9:35 and they were closing at 10. I felt bad but I really wanted the soup w the dumplings. So when we order I didn’t really enjoy bc there was no dumpling in my soup and the only entree I like was temporary. But the waitress was nice so I didn’t make a big deal. I was just disappointed. So when we finish paying around 10:15-22 my friend and I stayed talking. What we didn’t know was that we were the only ones left in the restaurant. It was hard to know when we in a corner and can only see a couple tables, not the whole restaurant. I’ve been noticing that the manager kept walking around our section doing nothing but walk and looking at us. So around 10:35 we were literally about to leave bc we got the hint and the second before I can grab my purse to leave, the manager in the red shirt with glasses kind of old, LITERALLY SAID WORD FOR WORD “Hey guys, I need you to start heading out because we’re trying to go home.” And his facial expression was not Polite. He seemed aggravated which I can understand bc my co worker and I work at a prestigious restaurant Called the Columbia Restaurant. And even if we have costumers 2 hours sitting after we close we are not allowed or have the right to kick them out. I tried calling Corp but every opportunity I had to called them, they’re office hours were closed and after a week I felt like there was not point of me calling to complain anymore. So I’m just going to write a review bc I felt so disrespected and did not enjoy my dinner. I will never return to this...