Ask an expert: Olive Garden review brouhaha

A charming review of an "Olive Garden" restaurant opening in Grand Forks, North Dakota has attracted a lot of attention, some good, some bad.

So, just to be scientific about things, we decided to ask an expert what it all means.

Marilyn Hagerty, a restaurant reviewer for the Grand Forks Herald, reviewed a new Olive Garden in her town, and the straight-ahead review went viral online, and gained her son, a Wall Street Journal reporter, a front-page byline writing about the brouhaha. (Talk about "When You're Here, You're Family," the chain's motto.)

A lot of folks made fun of her review (Last Word on Nothing's Cassandra Willyard sympathetically called it "unintentionally funny in its earnestness", noting the ridiculousness of reviewing the chain restaurant's offerings), and a lot of folks thought it was great. She ended up in New York, on a whirlwind dining review tour, which seems fair enough.

Despite this case seeming to be merely an almost perfect example of the inanity of the Internet Era, Science Fair forged ahead and asked an actual social scientist who has published on the Olive Garden and U.S. culture to comment. The University of New Hampshire's Michael Mario Albrecht, author of "'When You're Here, You're Family': Culinary Tourism and the Olive Garden Restaurant," published last year in the journal Tourism Studies, weighed in by email:

I think that the diverse reactions that people have to the Olive Garden speak to a great deal of larger cultural/political tensions that characterize the country right now. The earnestness of the older woman's review identifies her as occupying a particular position within the cultural landscape. People who are unapologetic about chain restaurants and urban sprawl tend to be more conservative leaning. Those who would mock an old woman for her earnest enjoyment of the chain identify themselves as a particular class of what David Brooks has called Bourgeois Bohemians. The "foodie" trend stems from a desire to differentiate one's tastes from others through consumption.

Regardless, Albrecht's 2011 study pointed out that the Italian dining seen as authentic by Olive Garden critics is itself an artifice, spawned after World War II by savvy restaurateurs catering to tourists returning to Italy.

Rather than looking down on phony restaurants, Albrecht suggests that diners adapt a "post-tourist" perspective and simply accept each theme restaurant on its own terms, concluding that, "the Olive Garden is a complicated assemblage of Italian and American, banal and exotic, surface and depth. Rather than simply reveling in its artifice, the post-tourist should look to adopt the tourist sensibility that makes the everyday strange, and to struggle with the complexities that comprise any place, regardless of its ostensible banality."

So there you have it. Make sure you ask for extra bread sticks.