"To look at [McDonald's fries] is to appreciate that these aren't just french fries: they're Platonic ideals of french fries, the image and the food rolled into one, and available anywhere in the world for around a dollar a bag.
I wanted and fully expected to find precisely the same Platonic french fry here in Nowhere, Idaho, that I'd had countless times at home and could expect to find anytime I wanted to in Tokyo, Paris, Beijing, Moscow, even Azerbaijan or the Isle of Man. What is that, if not a control thing? — and not just on the part of McDonald's. But whatever is behind it, this expectation can't be fulfilled unless McDonald's has seen to it that millions of acres of [Russet Burbank potatoes] are planted all over the world. The global desire can't be gratified without the global monoculture, and the global monoculture now depends on technologies like genetic engineering. It just may be that we can't have the one without the other.
This alignment of global desire and technology has been a great boon for the Russet Burbank, at least in terms of sheer numbers. Has there ever been a more successful potato in the history of the world? Yet its success is a precarious thing, for this particular set of potato genes (or rather now, potato genes plus one Bt gene and one antibiotic-resistance gene, courtesy of Monsanto) has also never been more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of nature or the fecklessness of a single species: us. Whether in evolutionary terms a monoculture really represents long-term success for a species is an open question. The Lumper, Ireland's favorite potato before the famine, was once nearly as dominant as the Russet Burbank; today, its genes are as hard to find as the dodo's.
Part of the pleasure those fries gave me was how perfectly they conformed to my image and expectation of them — to the Idea of Fries in my head, that is, an idea that McDonald's has successfully planted in the heads of a few billion other people around the world. Here, then, is a whole other meaning of the word monoculture. Like the agricultural practice that goes by that name, this one too — the monoculture of global taste — is about uniformity and control. Indeed, the monocultures of the field and the monocultures of our global economy nourish each other in crucial ways. The two are complexly intertwined expressions of the same Apollonian desire, our impulse, I mean, to elevate the universal over the particular or local, the abstract over the concrete, the ideal over the real, the made over the natural. The spirit of Apollo celebrates 'the One,' Plutarch wrote, 'denying the many and abjuring multiplicity.' Against Dionysus's 'variability' and 'wantonness' he poses the power of 'uniformity [and] orderliness.' Apollo is the god, then, of monoculture, whether of plants or of people. And though Apollo has surely had many more exalted manifestations than this one, he is here, too, in every bag of McDonald's french fries."
I just submitted a post to my sociology class about how Marie Kondo's Tidying Up brings the values of McDonaldizarion out of the workplaces and within our homes. I am living my best life right now.
Traveling through different towns, I probably couldn’t even keep track of how many McDonald’s I’ve passed. There must have been tens of them, demonstrating how fast the spread of bureaucratic rationalization has developed.
Michael Mario Albrecht, ‘When You’re Here, You’re Family’: Culinary Tourism and the Olive Garden Restaurant, 11 Tourist Studies 99 (2011)
Abstract
In this paper, I address the practice of domestic culinary tourism by focusing on a seemingly banal suburban chain restaurant featuring ethnic cuisine. I examine the ways in which the restaurant positions itself as offering ‘real’ Italian food and a ‘real’ Italian experience, and analyze a broad array of cultural texts that chastise the Olive Garden for this assertion and condemn the chain and its patrons. Ultimately, I demonstrate that many of those things that position the restaurant as an object of derision are part of the appeal of the chain, resulting in a complex set of meanings that resides in the Olive Garden as a site of cultural interest.
Introduction
In an episode of the cult television hit Weeds (2005), the character of Doug, played by Kevin Nealon, demonstrates dismay when a local Indian restaurant goes out of business and an Olive Garden restaurant is to be built in its place. Doug uncouthly observes: ‘What the fuck is wrong with these morons who go to wait an hour in line at some crappy Olive Garden and let a treasure like this go out of business ... . I wouldn’t take a dump in the Olive Garden.’ In his review of the episode, Gonzales (2005) offers a correlation between Doug’s distain for the Olive Garden and a specific kind of elitist snobbery that Gonzales suggests is characteristic of the audience for the television show. Gonzales asks: ‘Who else but a snobbish blue-stater would smile when Kevin Nealon on Weeds says, “I wouldn’t take a dump in the Olive Garden”?’ The ‘snobbish blue-staters’ to which Gonzales refers represent a specific cultural group of people in American culture, one with specific practices of tourism and dining, and one diametrically opposed to mainstream chain restaurants such as the Olive Garden.
In this paper, I position the domestic experience of ethnic dining as a form of culinary tourism, offering tourism as a mode of engagement and experience rather than as a specific form of travel. From there, I examine theoretical frameworks from scholars of tourism studies and beyond that offer a means of structuring the coexistent discourses of admiration and distain that characterize contemporary representations of the Olive Garden restaurant. In order to do so, I offer a description of the Olive Garden, its menu, and its marketing strategy in an effort to explain the appeal of the restaurant to a large swath of consumers and its ubiquity in contemporary media culture. For contrast, I specifically examine the critiques of the Olive Garden and the intense vitriol that accompanies those critiques. Ultimately, I contend that the competing discourses about the Olive Garden restaurant reflect ambivalence and anxiety that resonate with larger issues in tourism and travel and the complicated relationship that emerges when discourses of tourism and travel circulate in contemporary consumer culture and media culture. In the conclusion, I engage the figure of the post-tourist as offering a possibility for grappling with this ambivalence and anxiety.
Domestic ethnic dining as culinary tourism
Whether they know it or not, diners at domestic ethnic or regional restaurants, even large corporate chain restaurants such as the Olive Garden, are involved in practices that are akin to those involved in tourism as traditionally conceived. As Urry argues, ‘people are much of the time “tourists” whether they like it or not’ (2002 [1990]: 74). He contends that whether something is touristic has less to do with the actual practice and more to do with a specific relationship that people adapt when engaging culture, which he calls ‘the tourist gaze’. Munt expands upon Urry’s assertion and identifies ‘new, postmodern, tourism practices that may no longer be about tourism per se, but embody other activities’ (1994: 104). I contend that ethnic dining practices are among these new tourist practices that expand the term beyond its traditional meanings.
Long (2004) offers the term ‘culinary tourism’, which she defines as ‘the intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of an other – participation including the consumption, preparation, and presentation of a food item, cuisine, meal system, or eating style considered to belong to a culinary system not one’s own’ (2004: 21). Long’s definition opens up the possibility for thinking about ethnic dining as a form of ethnic dining. However, her definition does not neatly align with Urry’s framework; for him, the tourist gaze is a relationship that does not require active participation. In this schema, the relationship that constitutes the tourist gaze occurs whether the participant likes it or not, and I would add, whether he/she knows it or not. Further, Long’s reliance upon the ‘other’ as the key defining factor of culinary tourism forecloses the possibility that one can experience a part of one’s ‘own’ culture through a touristic gaze or within one’s own culture. Molz begins to open up the possibility, asserting that ‘unlike tourists in the traditional sense, culinary tourists can explore the exotic without leaving their own neighborhood. Ethnic restaurants are one of an increasing number of arenas in which people can engage in touristic practices within their own culture and as part of their everyday lives’ (2004: 53–54). Thus, the ethnic restaurant becomes a site for tourism, but Molz still focuses on the exotic. The Olive Garden offers a space in which the touristic gaze moves from the exotic to the banal. Further, I contend that precisely because they challenge the existing boundaries between the exotic and the everyday, restaurants such as the Olive Garden foster a cultural anxiety towards what some consider a watered-down version of ethnic dining and a version of culinary tourism worthy of distain. Interrogating a restaurant with a tourist gaze involves making that which seems ordinary strange and to complicate experiences by examining them through the lens of the tourist.
Examining the Olive Garden through a critical lens reveals a great deal of cultural ambivalence and anxiety inherent in discourses that circulate about the restaurant. This cultural anxiety emerges because restaurants such as the Olive Garden refuse pre-defined categories of the exotic and the everyday. In developing his concept of the tourist gaze, Urry asserts that ‘one key feature would seem to be that there is a difference between one’s normal place of residence/work and the object of the tourist gaze’ (2002 [1990]:11). The Olive Garden brings the promise of an ethnic experience into the confines of one’s normal place of business or work and consequently challenges that supposed binary. Indeed, Urry’s own formulation seems to run counter to this claim; if people are ‘much of the time tourists’, then that touristic gaze must involve myriad practices within people’s everyday experiences. Edensor’s (2001) formulation of tourism offers a possibility for tourism as spaces for antagonism and negotiation. In his schema, he addresses the seeming contradiction between the multitude of disparaging discourses about the Olive Garden and its immense popularity. Edensor writes that ‘tourism is a process which involves the ongoing (re)construction of praxis and space in shared contexts. But this (re)production is never assured, for despite the prevalence of codes and norms, tourist conventions can be destabilized by rebellious performances, or by multiple, simultaneous enactions on the same stage’ (2001: 60). Because the goal of culinary tourism can never be assured in advance, restaurants that exist in liminal spaces between the exotic and the banal or between the ethnic and the domestic emerge as sites of cultural anxiety. Specifically, the Olive Garden’s claims of ethnic authenticity does not correspond to the claims of its detractors who view the restaurant as inherently inauthentic, banal, and deserving of scorn.
Beyond authenticity
In the field of tourism studies, scholars have grappled with the term authenticity, and have used the concept to explain why practitioners of tourism in all forms seek out certain experiences and avoid others (cf. Boorstin, 1987 [1969]; Cohen, 1979, 1988; Culler, 1981; MacCannell, 1973; Urry, 2002 [1990]). A simplistic reading of the Olive Garden through a traditional language of tourist scholars is that those who eat at the Olive Garden are culinary ‘tourists’, while those who seek more adventuresome ethnic culinary experiences would be culinary ‘travelers’. For example, Urry (2002 [1990]) takes travelers to be those specifically interested in seeking authenticity in their travels, and who define themselves against the more mainstream tourists. These traditional dichotomies between authentic/ inauthentic and traveler/tourist have been belabored in tourist studies, and I will not elaborate upon them here. The simultaneous attraction and repulsion with the Olive Garden suggest a more complicated relationship that the ethnic diner has towards restaurants of its kind. In order to provide a theoretical base, I engage several theoretical lenses from tourist studies and related fields that provide useful frameworks for conceiving ethnic dining as a touristic practice and for addressing the simultaneous popularity and repulsion that exist in discourses about the Olive Garden.
One common critique of the Olive Garden and of chain restaurants in general is that they are spurious imitations of real places and that dining there is simply an unacceptable replacement for a more meaningful experience. Augé (1995) offers a theoretical framework that would characterize restaurants such as the Olive Garden as non-places, because they have no ostensible history that affirms their identity or uniqueness. He defines a non-place as ‘a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place’ (1995: 77–78). One of the goals of many who engage in touristic practices is to avoid non-places in their travels, and find the ‘real places’ that distinguish one place from another. Those invested in this quest would likely share the commonly asserted antipathy towards the Olive Garden. However, the characteristics of the Olive Garden that mark it as a non-place might be among the reasons for the restaurant’s popularity. For instance, those characteristics that might mark a restaurant as unique or as a place rather than a non-place might be uninviting for certain customers. Olive Garden restaurants have tasty, yet reason- ably familiar cuisine for the American palate. It offers ample parking, accommodations for large parties or children, reasonable prices, clean restaurants, and other amenities that are appealing to many consumers but that emphasize the non-place of the restaurant. Consequently, the non-place serves as a contradiction because certain culinary tourists despise non-places for exactly those reasons that make them popular, creating an imbedded cultural antagonism between groups. Thus, discourses about the Olive Garden and other non-places become sites whereby these antagonisms manifest as cultural negotiation.
Non-places also foster the conditions of possibility for ‘pseudo-events’ to transpire, a term that Boorstin (1987 [1969]) uses to distinguish them from ‘real’ events. Writing about traditional touristic experiences, Boorstin argues that ‘the multiplications, improvement, and cheapening of travel facilities have carried many more people to distant places. But ... the experience has become diluted, contrived, prefabricated. The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events’ (1987 [1969]: 79). In this model, the prefabricated nature of a restaurant such as the Olive Garden dilutes and devalues the experience that occurs there to the point that they are not even ‘real’ events. For Boorstin, the democratization of travel has lessened the value that traditional accompanied touristic practices. Much to the chagrin of scholars in this vein, restaurants such as the Olive Garden make the practice of ethnic dining and culinary tourism accessible for a much larger portion of the population, subsequently diminishing their cultural value. Worse for those invested in seeking distinction, the Olive Garden purports to offer an authentic ethnic dining experience; it wants to be a ‘real’ place or a ‘real’ event, though many still contemptuously view the restaurant as a non-place that facilitates a pseudo-event. Again, the search for ‘real’ events as opposed to ‘pseudo-events’ structures another antagonism within culture. Before the proliferation of restaurants such as the Olive Garden, the practice of culinary tourism was limited to those with the economic or cultural capital necessary to explore new culinary cuisine. Simply by offering culturally accessible food at reasonable prices, the Olive Garden is invested in a project of democratization that whittles away at the cultural capital of those invested in certain touristic practices.
Another common critique of restaurants such as the Olive Garden is that they are ‘all the same’. Ritzer (1996) coins the term McDonaldization to describe the increasing standardization and rationalization of multiple aspects of consumer culture. He defines the term as ‘the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world’ (1996: 1). For Ritzer, this is problematic because McDonaldized institutions often offer ‘a dehumanizing setting in which to eat or work’ (1996: 13). McDonaldization is based upon a foundation of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control, and Ritzer notes that ‘the success of the McDonald’s model suggests that many people have come to prefer a world in which there are few surprises’ (1996: 10). The Olive Garden is the quintessential manifestation of McDonaldization in the sit-down restaurant sector. In the 15 fifteen years since Ritzer first published his book, McDonaldized sit-down restaurants such as the Olive Garden have flourished. While its critics despair the increasing homogeneity of restaurant choices across regions and even across countries, the success of the McDonaldized restaurant industry is spurred in part by a great deal of demand by consumers who prefer not to be adventuresome in their eating, in order to experience a world ‘in which there are few surprises’. The Olive Garden offers the promise of the touristic experience without the danger or surprises that are characteristic of touristic experiences. This seeming discrepancy helps to explain why the Olive Garden and other manifestations of McDonaldization become a laughing stock for certain diners invested in culinary tourism while remaining immensely popular with others.
The theoretical premises of the non-place, the pseudo-event, and the McDonaldized chain rely upon an implied assumption of authenticity that eludes these categories, and purports to explain phenomena in contemporary consumer culture that the authors feel are detrimental to contemporary culture. However, rather than simply explaining existing conditions, these theoretical frameworks structure contemporary culture in ways that exaggerate existing cultural antagonisms and point to an aloofness on the part of certain cultural elites.
The Olive Garden’s appeal and its strategy of marketing Italian-ness
On his popular website that specializes in lists, Greenspan (2008) ranks the Olive Garden at the top of the list of ‘11 Chain Restaurants with the Least Authentic Food’. Greenspan contends that ‘the Olive Garden is the poster child of chain restaurants that just don’t do authentic’. He elaborates, noting that the reason for its number one ranking is ‘not just because the pasta is very generic and Americanized. It’s because they really try to sell the Italian aspects of the chain.’ Thus, the restaurant’s transgressions are twofold; it offers the premise of authentic ‘Italian-ness’ while maintaining the McDonaldized characteristics of a non-place. The Olive Garden markets itself as offering an experience that resembles an everyday Italian American experience – an experience ostensibly ordinary for those within the Italian American community, but extraordinary for the rest. Many of its commercials feature depictions of Italian American families reproducing at the Olive Garden an experience that is decidedly familiar in their everyday lives. Yet, the restaurant also markets itself as providing an everyday experience to those for whom that authentically Italian experience is ostensibly foreign. It simultaneously markets the comfort of the everyday coupled with the extraordinariness of ethnic dining, collapsing the distinction and bringing to the fore a contradiction evoked by resituating Italian ethnicity into the context of the mainstream.
In order to mobilize Italian-ness to promote customers’ dining experience, the Olive Garden restaurant constructs itself as the epitome of Italian-ness. Because authenticity in cuisine is often tied to essentialist assumptions about food preparation that insist that only biological Italians can create authentic Italian food, the Olive Garden works to counter the claims that the restaurant does not have the ethnic credentials to serve Italian food. Through their promotional vehicles, the Olive Garden makes claims about its authentic Italian-ness in order sell its version of Italian food. This strategy is in no way unique to the Olive Garden. As Girardelli explains, ‘terms such as “authentic” or “real” are classic buzzwords in the Italian food business segment. These terms seem to be necessary in reassuring the consumers that the “ethnic experience” is simulated into the minutest details’ (2004: 315). From its restaurant design to its advertising campaigns, the Olive Garden mobilizes Italian-ness in order to promote its product, and this very claim provokes a great deal of anxiety for those invested in certain versions of culinary tourism.
One of the most visible claims of the Olive Garden’s Italian-ness, and the site that provokes much of the opposition to the restaurant, is a widely successful advertising campaign that has been the hallmark of the restaurant since the early 1990s and features the catch phrase ‘When you’re here, you’re family’. While there are many iterations of this commercial, the two that seem to evoke the most resistance are those that feature a large Italian American family enjoying Olive Garden cuisine while talking loudly and gesticulating, and another in which an Italian American brings his Italian uncle to the restaurant for his first meal in America.
A Wall Street Journal opinion piece describes them quite concisely, albeit with a sarcastic running commentary. In it, Matus (2002) writes:
In one spot, a nephew says that when his uncle from Italy visited him for the first time, he took him to the Olive Garden. (His first time in America, and he is taken there?) The same thing occurs with an elderly man – the Italian family patriarch – who is brought to the Olive Garden to celebrate his birthday ... . And then there is the spot with the large family gathering at the Olive Garden, everybody laughing and having a good time, Dean Martin singing in the background, while someone, in that thick, unmistakable New York Italian accent, says that the food tastes as good as mamma’s.
These advertisements work to assert that the food at the Olive Garden is indistinguishable from that which an unidentified Italian (or Italian American, the terms are collapsed in these discourses) referred to as ‘mamma’ regularly prepares for the family or Italian enough that a ‘real’ Italian uncle would enjoy the restaurant. That such an ‘authentic’ Italian experience is available from the safety of suburbia is just an added bonus for the diner. One need not go to Italy or even Little Italy; authentic cuisine is available near the local shopping mall.
Another way in which the Olive Garden works to construct its Italian-ness is by maintaining and promoting its culinary institute in Italy. The website’s (2011) description of that institute notes that its chefs are trained at an institute in Tuscany that ‘in a restored 11th century village, is where Olive Garden’s chefs learn the secrets of great Italian cooking – like how to combine fresh ingredients – to create authentic Italian dishes that you’ll enjoy sharing with your family and friends’. By including this claim on its website, the company is not only grounding the origin of its cuisine in Italy, but also highlighting the values of family and shared dining experience that characterize its commercials. The restaurant also creates ties to mythical Italian-ness in the design of its restaurants. A press release from Darden Restaurants (2002), the Olive Garden’s parent company, notes that the architecture of the restaurant features a ‘Tuscan Farmhouse design, which recreates the rustic warmth and simple charm of a farmhouse in the Tuscan countryside. A spacious cafe with a bartop created from lava stone, then painted by Italian artisans; imported Italian fabrics that adorn seats and windows; and a warm, welcoming glow from Italian-made light fixtures invite guests to a comfortable dining atmosphere that pays homage to Tuscany.’ This pastoral image ties the large corporate chain that is located throughout the US and Canada to a specific locale that provides a mythic origin that demonstrates in theory the ‘authentic’ roots of the restaurant.
Besides the simulation of a Tuscan farmhouse in the façade that exists throughout the restaurant and the ‘outdoor’ café that sits outside the bar within the confines of the restaurant, the Olive Garden offers other markers of Italian-ness to assure the diner that he or she is consuming the real deal. The restaurant features many pictures of Italy, as well as pictures of people who are clearly marked as ethnically Italian – they exude Italian-ness. The restaurant also features bottles of Italian wine and ornate serving dishes as decorations throughout the restaurant. At no point in the dining experience can the diner avoid the Italian-ness that permeates the restaurant; even the restrooms have pictures of Italy and Italians on the wall.
Even though the practice of authentic ethnic dining is necessarily constructed and maintains no necessary link to a more pure place or time of origin, discourses that stipulate the ‘correct’ way to consume ethnic cultures continue to abound. Contemporary society maintains a desire for authenticity in its cuisine, and ethnic restaurants continue to promise to deliver that authenticity. Moreover, by consuming those ostensibly authentic cuisines, the consumer is the offered the promise of not merely consuming something exotic or authentic, but also of being able to transcend the monotony of the undifferentiated non- places and McDonaldized chains that characterize the everyday in contemporary society.
Bell and Hallows (2007) use the term ‘exotic everyday’ to describe the way in which the ‘everydayness’ of Italian peasant culture comes to stand in for the exoticness of a foreign culture. Specifically, they analyze the case of the food television star Jamie Oliver, who despite his English origins asserts an affinity with the Italian culture and works to construct his own Italian-ness. They assert that ‘Jamie has traded on a symbolic connection to “Italianicity” throughout his career ... . He belongs to a longer tradition in which the figure of the Italian peasant is used to represent the “exotic everyday”’ (2007: 28). The Olive Garden exemplifies the notion of the ‘exotic everyday’; however, for its critics it fails because it removes the everyday from the peasantry of Italy and resituates it in the strip malls of suburbia. Through this restitution, critics view the restaurant as a non-place and because of its ubiquity and proliferation throughout the US, the restaurant stands in as a mark of McDonaldization.
Italian/American cuisine
In one of his commentaries for the popular fake news program The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (2006), correspondent Dmitri Martin explains that the restaurant’s agenda is to ‘take [Italian] culture ... and make it as nebulous as possible ... . Is Olive Garden American or is it Italian? I don’t know, most people just think it’s shitty.’ Martin successfully isolates one of the reasons for the anxiety behind the restaurant; the Olive Garden ‘Americanizes’ Italian food. However, he is incorrect in his ultimate assertion; in fact, most people do not think that it’s ‘shitty’. The restaurant is consistently one of the more popular chain restaurants in the US. Martin is identifying a certain group or class of consumers that he characterizes under the umbrella ‘most people’. As such, through his quote, Martin reinforces the underlying distinctions in cultural capital that accompany the derision of the restaurant. While Boorstin (1987 [1969]) was unabashedly elitist in his assumption that ‘most people’ would be perfectly content with a pseudo-event, Martin exposes his naivety in his insistence that ‘most people’ do not like the Olive Garden’s fare.
Despite critiques that suggest that the restaurant offers an unappetizing hybrid of Italian and American food, the actual fare at the restaurant is remarkably similar to the myriad Italian American restaurants that exist throughout the US, and are not the targets of distain for being non-places or McDonaldized. The menu includes an assortment of pastas, meats, seafood, salads, and pizza – none of which would be out of place at other Italian restaurants in the US, and the quality of the food is comparable to other restaurants in the price range. While the Olive Garden will never be mistaken for fine dining, the food at the Olive Garden is quite comparable to that of other casual Italian restaurants throughout the US. The Olive Garden’s transgressions include its assertion to embody an authentic notion of Italian-ness, the remarkable sameness of all of the Olive Garden restaurants, and its preferred locale, the non-places of suburban strip malls. While the Olive Garden may indeed fail to deliver a taste similar to the cuisine of Italy, it fails in a way similar to the majority of Italian restaurants in the US.
Advertisements and the critics of the restaurant fail to realize that the real Italian-ness that the ethnic tourist ostensibly desires and that the Olive Garden ostensibly delivers or fails to deliver is itself a contemporary construct. The irony in the debate about whether the Olive Garden actually is Italian or a watered-down American hybrid comes to the fore when the debate is read through the specific history that has produced the phenomenon of Italian food in the US. Levenstein (2002) cogently argues that ‘Italian food’ changed dramatically in the US from its introduction in the late 1880s by the end of the Second World War. He shows that Italian Americans took great pride in their ethnic cuisine, but that ironically that cuisine owed as much to the half century since its introduction into the US as it did to its traditional Italian roots. He states that ‘the “Italian food” in which they took such pride was a hybrid, arising from interactions among cross-cultural influences within the Italian immi- grant community and the opportunities and restrictions of the New World’ (2002: 88). He goes on to add that the quintessential ‘Italian’ dish, ‘“spaghetti and meatballs” in its American form was practically unknown on the Italian peninsula’ (2002: 88). James supports this claim, holding that ‘it was not until the 19th century that olive oil became an indispensable ingredient in Provencal cooking ... similarly, pizza and pasta ... were originally only to be found in Italy’s southern regions’ (2005: 374). Even in southern Italy, which did in fact have pasta and red sauce, pasta was a luxury for the extraordinarily poor region; the staple grains were coarse bread and polenta and few could afford the luxury of meats (most relied on squid and octopus and other inexpensive seafood to provide protein) (Levenstein, 2002: 87).
To complicate the matter further, many foods such as pizza, spaghetti and meatballs, and macaroni and cheese have shifted from being markers of Italian-ness (despite the fact that they were not ‘authentically’ Italian) to being unmistakable markers of American-ness. Long emphasizes the ‘shifting from the exotic to the familiar and the inedible to the edible occurs constantly in the marketing of new foods to the American public (2004: 34). She specifically isolates pizza, which she explains ‘began as an ethnic food with some question as to its palatability. With acceptance it has become a common meal for many Americans and has lost much of its otherness (2004: 34). Thus, the strong reaction against the Olive Garden reflects an anger about a cuisine whose roots owe just as much to its history in the US as they do to Italy, and much of which has been nearly fully assimilated into American culture and culinary practices. Perhaps the hatred of the Olive Garden stems from them having any pretense of having roots in Italy. If so, their culinary institute in Italy, which creates a direct tie to the mythical motherland, actually works to fan the fire of its critics’ ire. Yet, the countless Italian restaurants in the US, with their checkered tablecloths and similar menus, are apparently beyond reproach for their version of ‘Italian’ food, which Levenstein and James maintain is by no means a product of Italy. Thus, locating the culinary institute in an 11th-century villa is ironic for a restaurant that serves food that reflects 19th and 20th century American influence.
These specific histories of Italian foodways point to the vast diversity of cuisines in Italy, and that the cuisines vary substantially between region and even town or village. One of the transgressions of the Olive Garden, which it shares with many Italian restaurants in the US, is that it fails to differentiate between these regional differences. All of the signifiers that the Olive Garden uses to assure its customers of its Italian-ness are not regionally specific, and become generic signifiers for Italian-ness that fails to make distinctions between regional differences or even differences in Italian cuisine as opposed to Italian American cuisine. While some links do exist between descendants from Italy being responsible for creating a certain style of ethnic cuisine, the Olive Garden’s Tuscan Institute pays no heed to the complicated exchange of culture that became ‘Italian food’. Moreover, there are historical links between those culinary styles and those in Italy and these historical links can be taken up in ways that reaffirm ethnic identity. However, these historical links do not dictate the perceived authenticity of the cuisine, nor do they necessitate a higher level of cuisine. The Olive Garden promises an escape from the non-places of contemporary American Society, but fails to deliver on its promise to some, and consequently becomes an object of derision.
Hatred of the Olive Garden
On an episode of ABC’s popular reality dating show The Bachelor (2003), Amber Stoke, one of the women vying for the affection of bachelor Andrew Firestone, asks Firestone to name his favorite restaurant chain. Firestone, a wealthy man whose family is in the restaurant and wine business, seems puzzled, so Stoke explains that her favorite restaurant is the Olive Garden. The following dialogue ensues:
Firestone: I don’t like the Olive Garden.
Stoke: You don’t like pasta?
Firestone: No, I like pasta.
Stoke: You don’t like Italian food?
Firestone: I like Italian food, I just don’t like the Olive Garden.
Stoke: I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like the Olive Garden.
Needless to say, Stoke did not receive a rose that evening, and consequently did not go on to live happily ever after with Firestone. However, the sheer disgust that Firestone expressed towards the Olive Garden is indicative of the polarizing effect and the cultural anxiety that the Olive Garden and restaurants like it induce.
Many of the cultural commentaries I engage support Firestone’s firm belief that the restaurant deserves nothing but contempt; yet the restaurant continues to thrive thanks to the loyal patronage of customers like Stoke. Part of the explanation for the divergent receptions and profound cultural anxiety that circulates in discourses about the Olive Garden, an anxiety that often evokes hostility and contempt, is that the restaurant highlights the constructed nature of authenticity and its complicated relationship with issues of ethnicity. Moreover, the restaurant serves as a site through which members of contemporary consumer society negotiate competing authenticity claims. This renegotiation explains the cultural ambivalence and anxiety produced by the alleged authenticity claims of restaurants such as the Olive Garden.
One of the specific sites of cultural anxiety through which these discourses are negotiated is the aforementioned advertisement campaign of the restaurant that depicts ‘authentic’ Italians and Italian Americans enjoying the restaurant and its cuisine. The commercials in this advertising campaign in particular have sparked a number of commentaries including a spoof on the satirical television show MADtv (2003) and an editorial in The Wall Street Journal (Matus, 2002), as well as myriad personal websites, some of which suggest that physical violence is an appropriate response to the horrific nature of the Olive Garden advertisements. In this section, I examine the enormous backlash and vitriol that the restaurant has evoked in the popular press and in cyberspace. Much of the hatred for the restaurant stems from the claims that the restaurant makes that it offers an authentic Italian experience, or that it promises the experience of the traveler while delivering an experience more suited for a tourist.
One of the promises that discourses of travel hold is that the process of authentically visiting and engaging with other cultures holds a degree of danger that cannot be achieved without leaving the culture zone of contemporary modernized Western culture. The same desire for a bit of danger is present in consuming ethnic cuisines; there is a danger in consuming raw fish, seemingly alien fruits and vegetables, and animal parts that are not usually a part of Western cuisine. Contrarily, in this schema, a restaurant such as the Olive Garden represents a non-place and the experience of dining there represents a pseudo- event. Armstrong (2003), a blogger writing in response to the Olive Garden scene in The Bachelor (2003) articulates this sentiment nicely. She states: ‘I guess I hold a special hatred in my heart for the Olive Garden, a place I reserve for good things that have been crushed and molested and sanitized, made safe for white American consumers.’ By chastising the Olive Garden for serving ‘safe’ and ‘sanitized’ foods, Armstrong is implying that the quest for authentic ethnic cuisine is one that should be dangerous, and perhaps even dirty. The Olive Garden seems to serve as the lowest denominator against which any sort of authentic dining experience can be measured in part because it is decidedly safe.
Yet, the hatred towards the Olive Garden seems to go beyond a simple condemnation of the restaurant for being a safe alternative to more supposedly authentic Italian restaurants. Beyond merely demonstrating a loathing of the Olive Garden as a cultural phenomenon, many critics of the restaurant feel that the commercials are deserving of explicitly violent retaliation. Alexander (2005), who runs a blog called commercialsihate.com, writes ‘In one commercial, a guy brings his cousin from Italy to eat at the Olive Garden Americanized chain restaurant food. I hope the chef had a bulletproof vest’, implying that the Italian will shoot his American cousin because of the Olive Garden’s cuisine. ‘Paul’, a participant on Alexander’s (2005) message board about hated television commercials, provides a similar commentary. He asserts that ‘my most hated commercial is for Olive Garden where the grandfatherly patriarch from Italy is taken to Olive Garden for his first meal in America. “When you’re here, you’re family”, Yea right, if I tried that with my relatives I’d be sleeping with the fishes.’ Like Alexander (2005), ‘Paul’ invokes violence by implying that his Italian family would kill him for bringing him to the Olive Garden; moreover, he evokes an Italian stereotype to explain how his body would be discarded.
The fact that these commercials provoke such unabashed ire and that its detractors even condone violence as retribution for the transgressions of these television commercials is testament to the societal tension evoked by the Olive Garden and its advertising campaign. Further, the violent impulse that informs these critiques points to a process whereby ethnic white working-class people are linked with boorishness and violence as a means of marketing ethnicity. Skeggs explains: ‘the hardness of white working-class men, the anti-authoritarian mafia “Italianness” (for example, the whole of Martin Scorsese’s output and The Sopranos) ... are marketable, offered as an experience, an affect, a partial practice, a commodified resource, offered for others to consume’ (2004: 105). As such, the language that critics of the Olive Garden take up reflects essentializing assumptions about Italians that is deeply imbricated in implied or explicit violence towards Italians or emanating from Italians.
In his critique of the Olive Garden commercials in his Wall Street Journal editorial piece, Matus (2002) employs a he sarcastic tone that is nearly ubiquitous in the critiques of the restaurant. Matus contends that these Olive Garden commercials are offensive to Italian Americans and do much greater harm by reproducing ethnic stereotypes than even the gangster-driven television series, The Sopranos. He further claims that these commercials are ‘ruining life for Italian Americans with any sense of origins’. Matus’ critique is driven by his insistence that the Olive Garden’s food is ‘bad’, and consequently gives a bad name to Italians. By failing to account for the ways in which the ability to differentiate between good and bad Italian is a specific historical and cultural construction, Matus espouses a common understanding of the role of taste in relation to food, but one that is decidedly un-nuanced and under-theorized.
Matus expresses a similar sentiment to those in a send-up of the commercials on the lampooning sketch comedy series, MADtv (2003). In its satire, the commercial begins by dismissing the restaurant as inauthentic. The narrator, who closely mimics the style of the Olive Garden commercials, begins by establishing that his is indeed an Italian American family and stating, ‘There’s nothing we like more than going out for a real authentic Italian meal. But, when I get a coupon, we go to the Olive Garden’. The sketch goes on to show- case the food of the Olive Garden, which in their version is comprised of hyperbolic versions of the blend of Italian and American food that causes the Olive Garden to be the bane of so many contemporary diners. The most ludicrous of these is a dish consisting of microwaved pasta with chicken nuggets and a hamburger drenched in alfredo sauce. The MADtv parody is indicative of the ubiquity of the tensions that the Olive Garden and its commercials produce.
To counter the Olive Garden’s authenticity claim, critics of the restaurant go to great lengths to hold that the restaurant is not in fact really Italian and that the families portrayed in the commercials are not in fact a real Italian family. One of the sites of contention is the fact that Darden, the Olive Garden’s parent company, is not in fact Italian or even Italian American. A banker interviewed by Matus (2002) sardonically quips about Darden that ‘It appears as though there’s not one Italian on the board. Either that or Lee, Rose, Smith, Erving [as in Julius], Blum and Wilson are pseudonyms for former wiseguys in the Witness Protection Program.’ This criticism not only supports the essentialist notion that Italians – or at least those with Italian sounding names – should be the sole proprietors of Italian cuisine, but also reinforces the stereotype that articulates all Italians with organized crime. That a publication with the reputation of The Wall Street Journal would unproblematically print these opinions speaks to the ubiquity of these essentialist assumptions about food and ethnicity in contemporary society. The prevailing wisdom is that real Italians would never set foot into one of these restaurants and that it is not deserving of people’s patronage; the trouble with this claim is that it implies that those who do enjoy the Olive Garden are tasteless cultural dupes.
The idea that real Italians would hate the Olive Garden is reinforced by Phillips (2006), a blogger and culinary ‘expert’ living in Italy, who comments on a rumor that the Olive Garden was opening a restaurant in Italy. The Olive Garden’s website makes no mention of any restaurants outside of the US and Canada, so Phillips is apparently responding to a rumor that was in fact untrue. Nevertheless, the blogger explains that ‘to appeal to locals they’d have to drastically change their meal plans, which do not follow the standard order in which Italian meals are served in Italy. And they’d also have to revise their recipes, which again don’t reflect what’s served in Italy.’ He concludes by noting that ‘the only people I can see at an Olive Garden ... in Italy would be homesick tourists, local office workers out on their lunch break, and perhaps students.’ Phillips’ matter-of-fact tone assures the reader that he is only providing his unbiased opinion as a culinary expert; yet by working to separate the restaurant from its ostensible country of origin, Phillips delegitimizes the restaurant and calls its vast popularity into question, which reinforces his hier-archal position in relation to the restaurant and its patrons.
Other critics chastise the actors in the Olive Garden commercials for not being authentically Italian, despite the irony of maintaining that those in the profession of acting should act authentically. ‘Suenewtotx’, one of the respondents to Alexander’s (2005) online forum, addresses the Olive Garden commercials and makes an explicit essentialist tie to ethnicity. She states that ‘I’ll bet these actors probably don’t even have a single drop of Italian blood in them! And they overdo the Italianisms, like the hands moving when they talk, the dramatic personalities, etc. They’re such fake Italians.’ The sentiment expressed in this quote suggests that the performance of ‘Italian-ness’ is not sufficient to ensure the authenticity of the restaurant; direct blood ties are necessary. In fact, the staged performance of authentic Italian-ness by the actors in the commercials reveals their attempt to deceive the general public, and opens the restaurant to criticism.
The loathing of the Olive Garden relies upon a complex logic that maintains that the restaurant traverses the boundaries of the authentic and inauthentic, the everyday and the extraordinary. In other words, the restaurant promises a real experience at a real place, while delivering a pseudo-event at a non-place. Further, for those invested in the project of culinary tourism that seeks to avoid pseudo-events and non-places, the restaurant and those who patronize it are worthy of contempt and scorn. The violent discourses and musings that surround the Olive Garden are not necessarily serious claims in that those who vent on blogs may not actually go out to the Olive Garden and shoot its chefs. Nor is the Olive Garden itself the sole producer of dissatisfaction in contemporary consumer culture. However, the violent language points to an anxiety that the restaurant brings to the fore – an anxiety concerning the decline of the real and the eventual standardization of places critics view as traditionally unique. In other words, the anxiety speaks to a fear of McDonaldization, a proliferation of non-places, and a population that is satisfied by pseudo-events.
The Olive Garden comes to stand at the nexus of competing claims that circulate within consumer culture. On the one hand, the restaurant produces relatively inexpensive fare that brings the sit-down dining experience of a real Italian restaurant to a larger market. On the other hand, the restaurant becomes a symbol for the process of standardization and a substitution of pseudo-events for the real thing. Regardless of whether these narratives of decline are objectively true, the proliferation of these discourses speaks to an anxiety about the role of consumerism, commodification, and standardization in contemporary culture.
Conclusion: The post-tourist at the Olive Garden.
Rather than summarily dismiss those discourses that criticize the Olive Garden for being too safe or “too standardized”, or question the motives or tastes of the thousands of people who enjoy the Olive Garden, I want interrogate the reasons that the Olive Garden acts as a site of so much cultural anxiety. It bridges the gap between the extraordinary and the banal, the exotic, and the familiar, and between culinary tourism and everyday dining. Its claims of authenticity and Italian-ness are insulting to many who maintain the values of cultural tourism; yet, these very same qualities work to bring mass appeal to the restaurant. Adopting the sensibility of a post-tourist allows the possibility to understand the appeal of the Olive Garden, while still understanding the grounds upon which many criticize the restaurant.
The figure of the post-tourist offers the possibility of escaping the binaries that emerge when characterizing certain locales as non-places, certain experiences as pseudo-events, and certain processes as McDonalization. Drawing upon a term coined by Feifer (1985), Urry (2002 [1990]) disrupts the traditional distinction between a traveler and the tourist through the figure of the post-tourist. The post-tourist is one who has forsaken the idea of attaining a truly authentic experience through tourism. Instead, in Urry’s schema post- tourists ‘almost delight at the inauthenticity of the normal tourist experience. “Post-tourists” find pleasure in the multiplicity of tourist games. They know that there is no authentic tourist experience, that there are merely a series of games or texts that can be played’ (2002 [1990]: 11). Further, Urry wants to challenge the notion that authenticity is a defining feature of the tourist experience. The notion of the post-tourist allows for the proliferation of levels of reproduction to stand in for an ‘original’, and allows for the possibility that such an experience can compete with or even eclipse the enjoyment of experiencing the original. Many less-adventuresome tourists would much rather experience Italy from the comfort of their hometown than taking an actual trip to the sub-continent. Ethnic dining offers the promise of being able to consume a little piece an exotic culture. However, the post-tourist knows that even this is a spurious promise, and he or she ignores or embraces this truth rather than condemning it.
The post-tourist does not necessarily seek elevated experiences through real places or events; instead, he or she simply adapts a tourist sensibility in his or her engagement with the everyday or the extraordinary. Urry notes that ‘it seems incorrect to suggest that a search for authenticity is the basis for the organisation of tourism. Rather, one key feature would seem to be that there is a difference between one’s normal place of residence/work and the object of the tourist gaze’ (2002 [1990]: 11). Thus, the key binary that distinguishes a touristic experience from a non-touristic experience is not between the authentic and the inauthentic, but between the everyday and the extraordinary. He goes on to claim that ‘there must be certain aspects of the place to be visited which distinguish it from what is conventionally encountered in everyday life. Tourism results from a basic binary division between the ordinary/everyday and the extraordinary’ (2002 [1990]: 11). The Olive Garden challenges the very division between the banal and the extraordinary by bringing the quest for extraordinary cultures into the terrain of the everyday. It offers the promise of offering a little piece of authentic Italy from the safe space of strip malls and off-ramps. Thus, I take the notion of post-tourism further than Urry, who would characterize the experience as engagement with an exotic other. I suggest that even in the realm of the seemingly banal, one can adopt a post-tourist sensibility. The structuring logic of the ordinary/everyday binary provides the condition of possibility for a post-touristic experience rather than any inherent ‘exotic-ness’ of a certain place.
I hold that adopting a sensibility of the post-tourist begins to accept the contradictions inherent in places such as the Olive Garden without automatically dismissing those places for those contradictions. Wood suggests that the post-tourist offers a possibility of agency, maintaining that ‘the post-tourist knowingly engages the façade, the surface, and the fake, as a mutable substance that may be transformed into an individualized product of remembrance’ (2005: 326). I go a step further than Wood, and argue that a restaurant such as the Olive Garden is not simply façade, though the veneer Tuscan-inspired walls might suggest that. Instead, the Olive Garden is a complicated assemblage of Italian and American, banal and exotic, surface and depth. Rather than simply reveling in its artifice, the post-tourist should look to adopt the tourist sensibility that makes the everyday strange, and to struggle with the complexities that comprise any place, regardless of its ostensible banality.
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