i think olive garden sucks, but then it's being compared to a dozen different mom and pop italian resraurants in my area that are excellent.
dw convinced me to go to the olive garden a few times when we at a mall, so it's not like i didn't give it a go. what makes me think they suck was that the first time, i ordered pork cubes in a wine sauce and not only was the pork bad (it smelled and tasted off), but there was a sliver of plastic in the sauce that the waiter admitted was from the bag that the sauce comes in. another time i ordered chicken parm. the chicken cutlet was pounded so thin and so badly overfried that it was like a wood chip. how can you screw up chicken parm?
so no thanks for me. dw knows better than to ask me to go again.