Olive Garden is a semi-Italian restaurant that serve quite low quality Italian-American food. This being said, it seems quite funny that the chain is now claiming that following Italian tradition might actually be the reason behind the downfall of sales.
Investors Starboard Value proclaimed in a 300-page treatise last week that Olive Garden was handing out too many breadsticks. Even if company policy states that servers should bring “one breadstick per customer at a time, plus an extra for the table” they often bring out more, which of course leads to waste.
In their defense, Olive Garden has put forward the ‘Italian generosity’ as an argument for the many breadsticks laid out on the table in front of guests. So, the breadsticks are safe for now. However the restaurant is still not doing great, despite all the marketing and publicity around deals like an unlimited quantity of pasta (literally, buckets of pasta) for just a few bucks for the whole week.
Maybe somebody should explain to Olive Garden that abundance is not a major quality of Italian food, and generosity is not judged by how many breadsticks are put out on the table. Instead, Italian food is all about quality, not quantity. It’s about the ingredients, not how many or how much of them. In fact, the most generous meal for an Italian probably consists in a forkful of spaghetti with a butter sauce and a very tiny bit of shaved expensive truffle on top. And with no bread please.