olive garden menu
Olive Garden challenges competitors with new menu
Its Italian restaurant chain opened its doors on Monday and began providing an $9.99 6-ounce burger as attempt to compete against fast-casual eateries and other sit-down restaurants. The company is owned by Darden Restaurants Inc., Olive Garden has been refining its menu while trying to draw customers amid intense competition following the recession.
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Darden CEO Clarence Otis has been advertising three-course meals that are targeted at those with a tight budget as well as small plates, to attract young, hip crowds. Darden's sales at the same time fell 4 percent over the month that ended on Aug. 25. Then, in October, the hedge funds Barington Capital Group took a 2.8 percent stake in the company and began making demands for adjustments.
Olive Garden conducted research to discover the competitors that were stealing the customers it was losing according to Jim Nuetzi, executive chef at the chain's 820 stores. "A lot of times we were losing them to a burger craving."
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Competitors have been making and refining burgers over the many years. Chili's restaurant, which is that is owned by Brinker International Inc. offers bacon, guacamole and miniature hamburgers that are sauteed with onions. EatEquity Inc.'s Applebee's restaurants have quesadilla hamburgers, as well as a Bourbon black and bleu burger that is slathered with spicy mayonnaise.
Olive Garden's menu became too costly and they couldn't redesign stores in a timely manner according to Peter Saleh, a New York-based analyst for Telsey Advisory Group.He believes the restaurant needs at least one hamburger in order to increase sales. He's not sure that it's in line with the restaurant's Italian roots.
"It would be the same as McDonald's trying to do some sort of pasta meal," he added. "I'm not seeing it."
The same was not true of the executive managers at Olive Garden, at first.
"There was hefty debate" and some were unable to imagine what the Italian hamburger would be like or look like, according to Nuetzi. Many were worried that arugula would not appeal the Olive Garden diners, most of whom are more familiar with Iceberg lettuce. Nuetzi was able to convince the opposition by cooking a burger that was Italian-style to test with them.
Nuetzi 41-year-old Nuetzi cooks since 14 when he first served pizzas at an Italian restaurant in Atlanta. He joined Capital Grille in 1998, which is now owned by Darden and then was moved from there to Olive Garden last year. One of his first steps was the creation of the Italiano Burger. Olive Garden's burger is served with prosciutto, mozzarella, pesto tomatoes, arugula and the spread of aioli.
The burger was tried twice during the year. The Nuetzi team tweaked the recipe after diners who weighed in -- doubled the spread of aioli and then slicing tomatoes instead of cutting them into pieces, as it fell from the bun and created the bun messy. The most significant change was French fries.
The majority of Olive Garden sandwiches used to be available as a la carte. Beginning next month, the sandwiches will be served with Parmesan garlic fries.
"It just became obvious," Nuetzi declared. "You've got to serve a burger with fries."
Darden shares have increased by around 18 percent over the last year. Brinker has risen 52 percent, and DineEquity gained 26 percent.Fake Italian restaurant chain Olive Garden has done the unthinkable: Nation's Restaurant News reports that the company took french fries and milkshakes from the children's menu to replace them with grapes or fruit smoothies. It is possible that it is an attempt to save America's fattie kids or to escape the evil Democrat plots to enslave everyone through legislating menu labeling and healthier food options.
We won't even talk about the fact that 754-units of the chain serve milkshakes and french fries to America's children. What's more Italian than fries or shakes? Olive Garden is clearly disgusted by America's national vegetable, the French fry. This menu change shows it.
The french fries were previously served with chicken fingers. Now the kids will be getting spaghetti with their chicken fingers (which may seem a little more Italian). The new smoothies, which come in the flavors Strawberry, Wild Berry and Peach-Mango, were clearly inspired from the hilly Tuscan country where their cooking school is situated.
Ruth Wakefield was a highly accomplished person: a college-educated dietician, teacher, chef, and the founder and operator of Toll House Inn, one of New England’s most famous restaurants. Then there’s what she’s most known for, the “invention” of the chocolate chip cookie, which is often described as a (very lucky) accident.
But the true story of America’s favorite cookie — and Wakefield’s role in it — is much more complicated. Wakefield almost definitely didn’t invent it, but she did popularize it, and it’s incorrect (and patronizing to Wakefield) to imply that the chocolate chip cookie’s rise to glory was any kind of accident.
Though it’s hard to imagine life without the chocolate chip cookie, in reality it has only been keeping milk company since the 1930s. But who was the first to make them? It’s a hard question to answer, due largely to the outsized fame of Toll House and Wakefield. This week, Gastropod co-hosts Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley get to the bottom of it in their episode, “The Way the Cookie Crumbles.”
Wakefield’s desserts were very important at Toll House Inn, with standout dishes like a three-inch tall lemon meringue pie, Indian pudding, baba au rhum, and the rich butterscotch pecan rolls served in every breadbasket. Butterscotch cookies dotted with chunks of semi sweet chocolate were served as a complement to ice cream and eventually people started asking for the recipe, which Wakefield gave freely. She also published it in her first cookbook, under the name “Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookies.” The originals were thin and crispy, unlike the squidgy, gooey cookies we more often see today.
As the recipe spread, Nestle began seeing sales of their semi-sweet chocolate bar (which had to be manually chipped up into small pieces for the recipe — hence the name “chocolate chips”) skyrocket. They approached Wakefield, who gave them permission to print her recipe on the bar wrapper as part of a promotional push to accompany the fourth edition of her iconic cookbook, the cookie recipe now renamed as “Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies.” Before too long, they also began manufacturing chocolate morsels, the little teardrop-shaped “chips” we all know and love. The chocolate chips, Wyman points out, is ”the only highly successful food product that was made just for a specific recipe.”
As the chocolate chip cookie’s popularity grew, it acquired the legend that Wakefield created it by accident. There are several variations on this origin myth: that Wakefield ran out of nuts and substituted chocolate instead; that she somehow managed to spill a jar of chopped chocolate into a finished bowl of dough (this, in turn, was sometimes attributed to a mixer run amok); that she ran out of time to melt chocolate to add to the cookie mix and threw chunks in instead, hoping it would melt and permeate the mixture in the oven; or even that she breezily subbed in chocolate when she ran out of butter, hoping that the chunks of chocolate would melt and take its place.
But, for Wyman, who spoke to former Toll House employees as well as Wakefield’s daughter while researching The Great American Chocolate Chip Cookie Book, those kinds of slapdash accidents just don’t fit with Wakefield’s reputation for efficiency, attention to detail, and immaculate customer service. “They ran a tight ship,” Wyman says. More likely, it seems that Wakefield — a trained culinary professional who was known for her delicious desserts — developed the recipe on purpose. In fact, Wyman found a 1970s article in which Wakefield told a reporter that she came up with the recipe on a flight home from Egypt.
But while there’s no doubt that Ruth Wakefield deserves credit for popularizing the chocolate chip cookie and developing a recipe that’s still beloved today, her chocolate chip cookie was actually not America’s first. Stella Parks, pastry chef and author of BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts, found newspaper advertisements from as far back as 1928 — a decade before Wakefield published her own recipe — describing chocolate chip cookies for sale. By the 1930s, Parks told Gastropod, all the major supermarkets — “Bi-Rite, IGA, Kroger, etc.” — were regularly baking chips of chocolate in cookies and selling them.
According to Parks, it’s much more likely that the chocolate chip breakthrough came about more organically, as a variation of the popular drop cookie, the chocolate jumble. Some chocolate jumble recipes called for up to 2 cups of chocolate shaved into the dough. Grating that much chocolate on an old-fashioned rasp is frankly, as Parks points out, “a real pain in the butt” and so she suspects some cookie-makers decided to take a shortcut, and just chop up the chocolate bar into small chips instead. Just like that, the chocolate chip cookie was born, in a highly relatable combination of laziness and pragmatism.
Today, everyone from Nestle to CNN wrongly credits the chocolate chip cookie’s invention to Ruth Whitfield and a happy accident. It’s just one of the many cookie myths busted in the latest episode of Gastropod, in which Graber and Twilley learn about the world’s oldest cookies, discover the cookie’s starring role as the world’s first industrial food, and get to the bottom of the longest-running cookie feud: Hydrox vs. Oreo. Follow and subscribe for more.
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