Marilyn Haggerty's amazing Olive Garden review and the subsequent viral shitstorm

I watched it all unfold, undoubtledly like many of us. In my case it was a Facebook link to a newspaper in North Dakota. A reviewer reviewed The Olive Garden, with all the ernest enthusiasm and wide-eyed amazement of a kid in a corporate candystore.

As a New Yorker, I have my moments where I get that stereotypical superiority complex, and reading the review was one of them. It was funny to me that in some places, an Olive Garden opening would be big news or that a review of the place would also warrant some column inches in the local daily.

When the review went viral, the reactions seem to be, Haha, look at the rubes who think that fancy dining is an Olive Garden. And then, the backlash towards them, asking what is it to you, city boy?

You can see all of it encapsulated thanks to Kevin Hoffman at the Minneapolis City Pages whose interview with a nonplussed Haggerty oozes with smarmy condescension. However in the interview, Haggerty doesn't take the bait, doesn't come off like Barney Fife as much as she does Sherrif Andy. And the comments vilify the author so much he was forced to add an addendum that says he didn't mean to be mean-spirited (about as convincing as your average Rush Limbaugh apology, but still.)

[A note to Hoffman: Everything is relative. I can find laughable charm in your "big" city just like any other jaded New Yorker could and please note that the banner ad on the page I linked - at least when I was on it last - was a link not to some new pasta purveyor, but a fucking Buca di Beppo.]

I lived in smaller places myself, places like Columbus, Ohio where chain establishments filled the year-end best-of lists without fail. This doesn't make for bad people. It makes for people with less choices, that's all. And you can note the differences - and even laugh about them - without being an elitist.

As a former writer, I always tried to write to my audience. Marilyn Haggerty has done that superbly, so well that it helped stir up the rural-wasteland-vs.-urban-elitism themes because her words were not just read by her audience, thanks to the power of the internet. If she didn't know her audience so well - if she didn't do her job so well - none of this would have ever happened.

But if we can recognice our differences with humor and respect instead of insecure posturing and defensive anger, we are a lot better off. And I think that lesson can apply not just to restaurant reviews-turned-internet memes, but for nearly every avenue of life.

Pass the breadsticks...

was pretty surprised to see this take off as much as it did.
she seems pretty cool

I just wanted to call to tell you how much I enjoyed your Olive Garden review.

Oh, I'm sure you did.

Kevin Hoffman does come off pretty dickish

Her best interview is here.

We were talking about it over here:

shit that looks like an onion article but isn't

<3 guilelessness, <3 Marilyn

― Carlos Pollomar (WmC), Friday, March 9, 2012 2:53 PM (51 seconds ago)

Kevin Hoffman does come off pretty dickish

Why is that it's always people from the midwest who seem most intent on making fun of rubes? It's like, dude, you're in Minneapolis.

haha you went there

" A reviewer reviewed The Olive Garden, with all the ernest enthusiasm and wide-eyed amazement of a kid in a corporate candystore."

This is really gross and unfair. People who write for community newspapers have to fill space, and she was nowhere near as enthusiastic as he makes her out to be.

cause they grew up being bullied by rubes? and they are still surounded by them and so are easily annoyed by them?

My booth was near the kitchen, and I watched the waiters in white shirts, ties, black trousers and aprons adorned with gold-colored towels. They were busy at midday, punching in orders and carrying out bread and pasta.

wait is that first post from somewhere or just a post

people thinking this review is somehow unique or remarkable is way more embarassing than the review itself.
i'm from a place way larger than grand forks where there is a full-time food reviewer on staff of the paper and his reviews don't really go beyond marilyn's work.

the only part that i thought was o_O in a bad way was at the end where she clearly just c/p'd olive garden PR copy but that's on her editors

haha that kind of thing happens all the time at community papers

anyway, where does this rank in terms of viral stars/memes of 2012

"The Drunken Noodle" doesn't sound like the kind of restaurant that you'd normally be at. Was it pretty wild there? Was there a lot of drinking?

So is it that the Minnesota food writer never heard of this dish, or is he just certain that the North Dakota food writer hasn't and he can have some fun at her expense?

I admit that I found this article funny when I read it but I really want this whole thing to end now. Every single additional thing written about it is just making it worse, especially the bloggers *coming to her defense* with even more heaped-on condescension and overanalysis.

yeah i agree

the internet gets so startled when it realizes someone is actually a real person

kevin hoffman pwnd - hoffman might as well have spanked him over her lap

real people can handle being internet memes they can even handle the occasional concern troll iirc xp

she needs to monetize her 5 minutes of fame, maybe she could work out a deal w/ olive garden

This all reminds me of that scene in Nurse Betty just before Aaron Eckhart gets scalped by Chris Rock and Aaron is trying to explain why his small town is so shit so he tells the story of how everyone queued up to go to the Burger King that opened up and Morgan Freeman tells him that's not stupidity, it's just ignorance.

Maybe she can get a reality show with that homeless radio announcer guy.

and that yo yo guy

and that cigar box guy

and winnebago man

Grand Forks is a college town. Big ass hockey arena and some awesome mid-century neon signage there.

I feel like there is a good forksclovestofu pun to be made in here somewhere but it's not coming

You can see all of it encapsulated thanks to Kevin Hoffman at the Minneapolis City Pages whose interview with a nonplussed Haggerty oozes with smarmy condescension.

just no

I'm amused by the article, not because I'm someone who enjoys pointing the finger of mockery at people from anywhere that's not Manhattan, but because I used to edit two weekly local papers in suburban NJ (yes, simultaneously) and we ran shit like this all the time. "Local event of no interest to anyone not from this town" was front page news every single week. We ran pictures of people's Christmas light displays. Articles about the installation of a new streetlight - not a streetlight at an intersection that had previously not had one, but the replacement of an older model streetlight with a newer model. And yeah, food reviews were of new chain restaurants. So for me it was a (semi-)fond memory of a past job.

I think the onion-esque picture of her is prob what made this big as much as the actual content

haha, you are describing my job exactly. If you were in Union or Essex county it might have even been the same chain of weeklies. xpost

...with all the ernest enthusiasm and wide-eyed amazement of a kid in a corporate candystore.

also, i see a fair amount of poker-faced "well, it's a job" -style uncynical awareness in her review

In fact there was an old lady there who I remember wrote a glowing review of the very ordinary chinese carryout place across the street from the office. But the thing is I had to write complete bullshit all the time, b/c there just wasn't enough going on in the tiny town I covered to fill a paper. I wrote story after story on exactly how many downtown businesses were vacant, whether a sign ordinance would help, the (non) progress of the development and construction of a relatively small mixed use property, a "controversy" over a "historic" flagpole that the town wanted to remove, etc.

My big scoop was that a local beauty salon owner might have *embezzled* a few thousand dollars from a charity haircutting event that she held.

I just wanted to call to tell you how much I enjoyed your Olive Garden review.

Oh, I'm sure you did.

― mizzell, Friday, March 9, 2012 3:44 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

she pretty much pwns him out of the gate with this

haha, you are describing my job exactly. If you were in Union or Essex county it might have even been the same chain of weeklies. xpost

I live in Union County, so yeah, I bet you work for W0rr@ll. I quit one week after I stumbled across the ad section of one of my papers and saw a quarter-page ad from some church, asking its parishioners to come in that Sunday and "pray for an end to the plague of homosexuality."

I think it's totally weird this blew up, but OTOH I grew up reading and eventually working at rural papers, too.

Also a new Olive Garden is huge in a town that hasn't had one in the area. One opened up in Las Cruces right before I moved and there were lines out the door for weeks. No joke. My parents were very proud our hometown finally got an Olive Garden; they made a point of driving near it to point it out (they did the same with the new Carl's Jr., we ate at neither bcz both too expensive for my family).

haha, you are describing my job exactly. If you were in Union or Essex county it might have even been the same chain of weeklies. xpost

I live in Union County, so yeah, I bet you work for W0rr@ll. I quit one week after I stumbled across the ad section of one of my papers and saw a quarter-page ad from some church, asking its parishioners to come in that Sunday and "pray for an end to the plague of homosexuality."

― 誤訳侮辱, Friday, March 9, 2012 5:41 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That is exactly who I worked for, but it was a number of years ago.

At the county weekly I worked for, the first article I wrote was about how someone had driven on the post office lawn. Between that and the photo, it took up half a tabloid-size page. The paper owner had dibs on writing restaurant reviews because those were easy/fun writing compared to reports of a cow blocking traffic or the Rotary Club meeting or the stuff I usually wrote about.

Ah, OK - I misread your post and assumed you were current.

I think the weirdest stories we ran were local coverage (in rural Idaho) of Sept. 11 news like "friend of cousin thought about going to NYC last week; did not die in plane."

haha, the old "local angle on a national story" bit -- the editors were always pushing that

"kids shove plastic Solo cups in school chainlink fence to spell out NEVER FORGET"

There was a little french casual cafe in the town I covered, like an order-at-the-counter place with crepes and quiche and stuff like that, and I was there right when the Iraq war was ramping up, and there started to be a minor phenomenon of assholes driving buy and yelling shit out the window at the place -- "Go back to France" etc. Ironically the owner was a woman from Vietnam who was married to a Vietnam vet. She wouldn't let me write about it though, I guess out of discomfort or slight fear. The one that got away.

kevin hoffman isn't from minnesota btw:

Kevin Hoffman will be the new editor-in-chief of Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages, Village Voice Media announced today.

Hoffman, presently the managing editor of VVM's Cleveland Scene, will take over from departing City Pages editor Steve Perry early next month. Perry announced yesterday that he is leaving the paper to pursue other opportunities.

A 1998 graduate of Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, Hoffman worked for the Associated Press and the daily Wilkes-Barre Times Leader before receiving his master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in May 2001. He briefly worked at the weekly Cleveland Free Times before being hired as a staff writer at Scene in January 2002. He was promoted to the managing editor position at Scene three years later.

During Hoffman's tenure at Scene, the paper took first-place in general excellence in the Missouri Lifestyle Journalism Awards and was named the best weekly in Ohio in numerous state contests. Hoffman himself has won numerous awards for his writing, and his story "Soul of the Brute" was included in Penguin Books' Notes from the Underground; The Most Outrageous Stories from the Alternative Press, published in 2005.

Hoffman, 30, will be in Minneapolis next week to meet City Pages staff. He is married to Erin Hoffman, an attorney specializing in constitutional law.

Kevin Hoffman: yet another thing about Village Voice Media that sucks.

oh my god he sounds like the worst

bleatreader 8 hours ago

Is the city pages that is making fun of this person the same city pages that published a review of a new My Burger, a fast food burger joint, when it opened in calhoun-isles a couple of months ago?

Flag Like ReplyReply Joel 7 hours ago in reply to bleatreader

You mean the review with the stunning insight of: "The chicken sandwich was very well-seasoned; not overloaded with mayo like most chicken sandwiches you find. Even the French fries tasted fresh. Our only complaint was with the onion rings, which didn't really taste very oniony."

https://goo.gl/maps/o756mq3M9qt9EV126

"Customer service is very nice. And to talk about Food..... it's just “wow,” if u want spicy food like real Nepali Style you’ll get to have it. So I highly recommend you guys go to this awesome Restaurant. 🫡
I also have a picture of delicious food I tried 😊 …"

real Nepali style

Unlike all those lame-ass fake Nepali joints in the North Dakota. I mean, some of those places don't even have real yak milk, let alone authentic chapatis. Sure, they will serve you dal bhat, but it's probably not proper Nepali dal bhat, because they use too much tamarind. Might as well just call it Pakistani food.

Sheesh.

from this review it sounds like grand forks doesn't have any other nepali / north indian / pakistani restaurants? that can't be the case surely.

there's a very midwest thing going on in the review of not acknowledging someone's national background / ethnicity (because it's rude to do so?) but also communicating strong "they aren't like us" vibes that is way too on-the-nose and very off-putting of course.

if this restaurant and review were in colorado we'd have three paragraphs about the magic of nepal and sanctification of the immigrant family with an orientalist flavor.

I found this: https://www.houseofpunjabgf.com/

their website is intimidating

so after visiting 20 times you get 20% off all future purchases? that's a lot of investment i gotta say! i dunno if i could name five restaurants i've been to 20 times in my life.

North Dakota is a shining beacon to everyone yearning to be free

(Will there ever be a Dakota Reunification?) #ONEDAKOTA

why is there no east dakota

A pizza spot named Crust, ironically located in the Earth's core

Open a pizza shop in Antarctica and name it South Pole Pizza

why is there no east dakota

Heh heh heh

https://i.imgur.com/4WOKeHL.jpg

There's no way I come close to believing that, but heh heh heh nonetheless.

The definitive Dakotie film

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEC9ZcV-ehk

She returned to OG a decade later:

There are appetizers including meatballs parmigiana and spinach artichoke dip. Homemade soups and salads include minestrone and a creamy chicken and gnocchi with roasted chicken.

The choices are many in the restaurant with its large parking lot and large seating area in the south end of business in Grand Forks.

With friends and family, we found the familiar menu on a recent winter day. Five of us were seated in one of the large and homey dining areas. Service was good. Friendly.

We tried the fettucine alfredo, which is a favorite. The menu says it is made in house every day. The classic entrees include chicken or eggplant parmigiana, lasagna, spaghetti and meatballs, shrimp and chicken scampi. There are stuffed pastas including a new ravioli carbonara. And there is a choice described on the menu to create your own pasta. This gives a choice of pasta, a choice of sauce and a topping, if desired.

We found the Olive Garden a pleasant setting to visit with friends — Joel and Amy Medd along with son Bob Hagerty and granddaughter Carmen Hagerty visiting from Pittsburgh. The staff is very friendly at the Olive Garden. And on visits there I am reminded of days in March of 2012. That was the time that an Eatbeat column in the Grand Forks Herald caught the attention of national reporters. Some at first scowled at the attention given a chain restaurant. Then their fury turned to support. And there were calls from Fargo, New York, California, Florida. This writer was invited to widely discuss on national television the Olive Garden arrival in Grand Forks.

Joel and Amy Medd along with son Bob Hagerty and granddaughter Carmen Hagerty visiting from Pittsburgh.

This speaks worlds about where Haggerty comes from. It has a different mindset.

there were calls from Fargo, New York, California, Florida

The ordering here is chef's kiss

some at first

I legit hope Carmen enjoyed her dinner.

(BTW our local Olive Garden, like our local Red Robin, has little electronic tablets at each table - once you have placed your drink order you can play trivia quizzes or Angry Birds-style games. Then you can pay and tip through it. Judge me as much as you like, but sometimes it's a godsend for a hyperactive toddler who cannot otherwise make it through an entire meal in a sit-down restaurant.)

If I went out to dinner with this lady, I would insist that my name not be dropped in the review, or maybe put “Anonymous Diner” in place of my real name.

“You’re wonderful company, but I’d rather be eaten alive by rats than be associated with any of your reviews.”

I on the other hand would pay her to insert my name into her copy, then expect her to pick up the tab for my marinana-smothered pillow cushion.

😂

Marilyn Hagerty, turning swords into plowshares and fury into support.

I spent $93 on dinner for 2 people at Applebee's and was impressed by the large portions and tasty entrées https://t.co/mLLJMFAtW1

— Insider Food (@insiderfood) October 21, 2023

It took me a an embarrassingly long time to realise Marilyn Haggerty was not Merle Haggard. For a moment I thought I’d found the greatest thread of all time

Some people go to Florida. Some prefer Arizona. Maybe Texas.

Then there are those who prefer a motorcycle or sled ride over to the Snow Sled Inn near Crookston.

They go there by sled when the snow piles up. Many get there by motorcycle the rest of the year. They talk, they eat, and they just hang out.

Everybody seems to know everyone else. At least that’s how it was on a recent stop there with my niece, Joanne Jensen of Sacramento, Calif. She was hanging around on one of her occasional visits to the “hinterlands.”

Like Richard Ford narrated by Sam Elliot.

lol

Almost all Calico cats are:

The seating was pleasant along a north side window in the lounge. Service was good, and our server was unobtrusive.

We were able to visit and look around. The large parking area all around is a plus for the Ground Round.

I wonder if large parking areas matter to her b/c she's looking for fast exits if the sirloin is too rare.

best post:

the EXACT opposite

no working day could ever reduce me to near-breakdowns the way attempting to cook does, every time, without fail

― lex pretend, Wednesday, March 14, 2012 11:40 AM

i seem to recall lex eventually getting into cooking because of the love of a good man, or am i misremembering that?

I think so. The love of a good man can inspire one to make homemade pesto

She's in Arizona and still going (98!). From one of her last Grand Forks Herald pieces:

And customers you notice seem to have their own favorites from burritos and enchiladas, quesadillas and dozens more choices. The El Poco Loco brings layered corn tortillas filled with beef and topped with cheese, lettuce and tomatoes. And black olives!

One of the specialties is a Norwegian taco. It's topped off with beef or chicken. Then garnished with lettuce and tomato and sour cream.

The choices seem vast at Mexican Village.

I feel for that black olive.

What makes that taco Norwegian?

burnt a church down

lol

the sour cream is floating in herring

lmao Neanderthal

In Norway, fredagstaco has become a cultural phenomenon. Fredagstaco was coined by the younger generation and translates to “Friday’s taco.” Tacofredag is another common name for it. As the week comes to a close, many Norwegians have tacos on their minds for Friday night dinner.

I was thinking maybe a lutefisk taco (and now that I know it was a Friday thing, that, or some kind of fish, seems more likely), but why have the option of adding beef/chicken? Wouldn't someone who wanted that just order a regular beef/chicken taco?

Marilyn doesn't make the Norwegian taco sound much different than a regular taco but apparently it is it's own specific thing.

The customers use the handy parking lots near the front door.

Has she ever had negative things to say about a parking lot?

I still don't know what makes it Norwegian, but apparently it involves a "lightly deep fried pita":
http://www.mexicanvillagegfnd.com/uploads/1/7/3/4/17344017/2022-takeout-page-1_orig.png

Fjordjitas

“lightly deep fried” is the jumbo shrimp of contemporary cuisine

The first weekend of April has rolled around and out. The fish in the Red River probably have no idea of who is going fishing. Or when. Or where? Or that a license is required.

The time has come to stack gloves and mittens away — laundered if possible. The time has come to check out the lakes and how well the cottages survived the winter. And maybe some hunters know that spring turkey season opens on April 15.

keeping it real, respect. i'd read marilyn's almanac of northern life.

First paragraph is a metaphor for Trump’s America