Olive pits

I’m presuming you’ve heard about the contretemps surrounding the Grand Forks, N.D., restaurant review of the new Olive Garden store.

The review was actually about as bland & whitebread as anything you’ll find on the menu of any of the 67,433 OG outlets in the Lower 48. But because it didn’t excoriate the food, it went viral & picked up all kinds of snotograms from bloggers & tweeters.

(This kind of reminded me of the woman who used to “review” restaurants for the Pasadena Star News, where I worked for a while. Possibly because all her food was comped by the establishments she was writing up, or maybe just because she really, really enjoyed her eats, she never met a meal she didn’t like, or a restaurant she didn’t give top marks to.)

But it turns out that when Grand Forks Herald writer Marilyn Hagerty focuses on the ambiance of a place, she’s practicing in print what our mothers used to tell us to do: if you can’t say anything nice about someone, find something you can’t denigrate. As in, “Tuna surprise? Oh, what a lovely dish you have it in!”

So she spent all her time talking about the décor, rather than the chow.

But the thing I get the biggest kick out of, in this whole farrago is a comment that appeared on one of the critical sites, Fark: "Residents of Grand Forks, N.D., are lining up for blocks to enjoy a one-of-a-kind European dining experience that finally puts the city on the culinary map with its unique brand of Tuscany refinery. It's called The Olive Garden."

Here’s my response to the whole thing:

Grand Forks has blocks?