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The Olive Garden's Tuscan Cooking "School" Is Real -- And So Is This Review

By Ian Froeb on Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 4:09 pm

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The Olive Garden's Tuscan Cooking "School" Is Real -- And So Is This Review

Credit Eater with digging up this gem, a Reddit Q & A with an ex-manager at the Olive Garden. In it, the ex-manager reveals that there truly is an Olive Garden Culinary Institute of Tuscany, the existence of which has been the target of much disbelief and derision.

If you have a very generous definition of "culinary institute," that is.

[The school] was more like a hotel, during the off-season, with restaurant on site. They would let the Olive Garden come and stay in all the rooms (small place-maybe 20 rooms) and they would use the restaurant (closed to the public-again off season) as a classroom for maybe an hour here or there and talk about spices or fresh produce for a minute before going site seeing all day.

Meanwhile, so that we reach our decade's quota of Olive Garden-related links, I offer a review of the Olive Garden penned by none other than Pulitzer-winning restaurant critic Jonathan Gold of our sister paper L.A. Weekly. The review is the result of a misfired April Fool's joke. As you can see from the comments, not everyone is laughing.