Why America Is Addicted to Olive Garden

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CEO Clarence Otis is bringing Darden's brands together in a single building for the first time | Photograph by John Loomis

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Kitchen Monitors run Meal Pacing software created by Patti Reilly White and her IT group

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Pickens starts every meeting with Olive Garden senior executives by reading letters from customers and employees -- a woman's description of her celebration at Olive Garden after having survived cancer; the reunion of an EMS worker, a 911 operator, and the boy they saved from drowning; the story of a young woman who dined every Tuesday at the table where her fiancé proposed before he was shipped off to Iraq. The managers share the letters with their staffs.

Pickens has brought a leather-bound collection of these letters to our dinner. Between bites of bruschetta, he reads one about Molly, a girl with Down syndrome who enjoyed coming to the restaurant with her family so much that she dreamed of working there. Pickens's voice breaks as he reads the letter. He shows me a photo of Molly, who got hired as a hostess. "A big part of my role is not just to make sure we do well financially but to reinforce what we stand for," he says. "I want staff to realize we have a brand that people love."

Olive Garden promises "an idealized Italian family meal, whether you're Italian or not," says Pickens. When General Mills launched the chain in 1982, it was an affordable Italian restaurant -- a safe choice, nothing surprising. By the 1990s, it had hundreds of locations, but the menu had grown stale and sales were in decline. "It lost its culinary and cultural soul," says John Caron, Olive Garden's head of marketing.

Darden turned to research. "The key consumer insight was that people missed the emotional comfort and connectivity that comes with family," says chief operating officer Drew Madsen, then the chain's head of marketing. "People come to a restaurant for both physical and emotional nourishment. The physical is the food; and the emotional is how you feel when you leave."

Olive Garden executives began tying everything to this mythical Italian family, adopting the tagline, "When you're here, you're family." New locations were designed to suggest Italian farmhouses, with a large family-style table, modeled on one in a Florentine trattoria. Then executives formed a partnership with actual Italians: Olive Garden's Culinary Institute of Tuscany (CIT). It was a "stroke of genius," says Dennis Lombardi, a veteran food consultant. Eleven times a year, the company sends 14 top employees, many of whom have never set foot in Italy, to spend a week in an 11th-century village in Tuscany and learn from Sergio and Daniela Zingarelli, a husband and wife who operate a restaurant, winery, and inn. The couple and other local experts expose the Americans to everything from how olive oil gets pressed to how to layer flavors in a Bolognese sauce. The Olive Garden employees buy fresh vegetables at a market in Florence and prepare a multicourse Italian meal. "It's like getting into Harvard," says Pickens. "It's not, of course, but you know what I mean." Since 1999, some 850 employees have attended CIT; 80% of them are still with the company.

There are also what Caron calls "ideation trips" to CIT, during which chefs work in local Tuscan restaurants. They have come back with dozens of ideas that have served to expand and update Olive Garden's menu. Gone are the days of puzzling hybrids like Italian nachos. Today, many items on the dinner menu carry a CIT logo, designating that they were inspired by a staffer's experience in Italy.

These experiences -- and menu items -- provide an authenticity that's rare for a chain. Take risotto, an Italian staple that made its way into Olive Garden only two years ago. In a pilot program at a small number of restaurants, diners were initially tepid. As attitudes changed, the test kitchens took on the preparation challenge; risotto requires 20 minutes to cook, longer than customers are willing to wait. Chefs eventually found a more expensive variety of rice that could be cooked most of the way through in advance, finished off just before serving, and still retain the desired taste and texture. Risotto is now part of a CIT-inspired entrée designed to entice more adventurous diners who might not have considered Olive Garden: Chianti-braised short ribs (minus the bone -- a concession to American tastes) and portobello mushroom risotto. It's Otis's favorite.

The restaurant business looks really simple: Put food on a plate and smile," says Christopher Muller, a professor at the Rosen College of Hospitality Management at the University of Central Florida. "Yet it's an incredibly complex undertaking."

Essentially, Darden runs 1,770 just-in-time manufacturing plants that create in minutes a wide range of products selected, consumed, and judged by customers who show up unannounced. Foodies may scoff, but standardizing the preparation of Chianti-braised short ribs and risotto at hundreds of restaurants by thousands of employees requires innovation and creativity. And the inventory can't just sit around on the shelf. Leftover ingredients are refrigerated in day-stamped plastic bags, and anyone using an outdated item is fired on the spot.