Olive Garden is one of our favorite restaurants for a couple of reasons. It is usually quiet. There is no TV blaring telling you stuff you need to buy, or a game you need to watch. The wife and I love this. By the way, I'm getting no funding from Olive Garden for this blog post.
So here is the breakdown:
- We weren't starving when we got to Olive Garden, this helped us not order giant plates becoming leftovers.
- Olive Garden serves bread forever. It's like Red Robin's bottomless fries. So, we snacked on the bread while we waited for our other food.
- We sampled a glass of wine for free.
- We split their lasagna special for $12.99. This included unlimited soup or salad for 1 person (we only had 1 refill. I ate one bowl, the wife ate the other. If you get excessive with this splitting this they charge you).
- The lasagna order included chicken marsala ravioli and fettuccini alfredo.
This totaled to $14.03 after tax. The wife and I liked our service so we tipped 20%+. We will do this sometimes if we split and the server is nice to us. In this case, they served two different plates with half of each of the three entrees, so there was no awkward sharing.
This brought the total to $17.00.
I had promised the wife Cold Stones Creamery ice cream, so we went there next. The wife ordered a little known kid size ice cream with Oreos. It is small, at about 1 scoop of ice cream + topping. However, it came out to $2.49 bringing our total to $19.49.
I paid for these items with my new credit card, which will give me a $200 reward after spending $500 within 3 months.
Also, just eating a moderate amount of food helped us not be in food coma the entire night.
