Olive Garden

Attention to Detail

by kjones10 at Citysearch

Baltimore's Olive Garden on Perry Hill was very dissapointing! Looking for a nice evening of takeout on a Sunday night. No other Italian restaraunts in the area like Olive Garden, so we drove the 25 minutes thinking that it would be well worth it.

Not only was the order wrong, but the pasta was overcooked too! We ordered pasta with meat sauce, but got pasta with marinara sauce - the family meal. What a bummer to get all the way home and see that the spaghettit had the wrong sauce.

We are so tired of having to check our food when we have been assured that everything is fine (e.g., counting nuggets, checking sandwhiches for meat, etc). Sometimes you want to get what you ordered and pay for, but I guess that is too much to ask -- but we got plenty of salad dressing, like 8 containers for a small salad!

We won't be back to this Olive Garden and consider our $45+ wasted, as well as, dinner for tonight. The take out really sucks!

Ridiculous wait times

by dbenesch at Citysearch

Walked out of this Olive Garden once again, as it was by far the worst experience I have ever had at this particular one. We like the food. We like American Italian, and I don't care how many people want to ridicule us for it.

But every single time you go here on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, after 4:30, you are looking at wait times of over an hour and if you come at 5:30 - ?, you can be prepared to wait at least 2 hours. If it was one weekend where you had to wait 2 hours, that's going to happen, but it is literally every weekend you come here, you can be prepared to wait for 2 hours, and I think that is ludicrous. It is not like Olive Garden is a fancy, upscale restaurant that warrants this type of wait.

To make matters worse, the Lobby of this place is extremely cramped and nowhere near designed to handle the amount of traffic waiting to be served. You must literally stand shoulder to shoulder with fellow strangers all waiting to be served. Getting through the crowd to the restroom is a chore in its own right.

To top it all off, we had an extremely rude hostess snap at a person in my party, named Michelle. When he asked how long the wait was going to be, she snapped at him "You WERE TOLD when you got here it was going to be a 2 hour wait. You've only waited an hour." At which point after a testy exchange I had with her for being rude and disrespectful, we walked out.

Until Olive Garden understands that they are not meeting the demands of its customers in this particular market by refusing to build another restaurant in Harford County, which is where I am convinced accounts for a significant amount of the traffic at this restaurant, it will only result in upset guests who will simply stop patronizing them, such as my family.

Between the wait and nasty service people who are not customer-oriented, we're just not putting up with it anymore.

• Pros: Reasonable Prices
• Cons: Horrendous wait times, Unfriendly staff

marge

by margemike at Citysearch

If you want the all you can eat salad and bread sticks but better Italian food try the Olive Tree in Aberdeen, Md. They have larger servings and the food is great especially the crab alfredo. The put in large amounts of lump crab meat and it is delicios. If you have tried the Olive Garden and then go to Olive tree you will never mix them up.

• Pros: inexpensive, Good Parking, Plenty of room

The McDonald's of Itilian food

by samsam9999 at Citysearch

Olive Garden is the McDonald's of Itilian food.

If you want real Itilian food, there is a little place next the Carrousel Hotel in Ocean City Maryland call Anna Maria's. Anna retired recently, but she past down all of the traditions to her son, who now runs the place with the same pride as his mother did. The food is great and they know how to serve correctly.

Enjoy!

Mediocrity at its finest . . .

by wingnutt5 at Citysearch

With all the fantastic restaurants in Baltimore's Little Italy, laziness is the only excuse for visiting the Olive Garden. On several "lazy" nights, I have visited two suburban locations. The Columbia location was especially busy some nights, and the quality of the food has been unreliable. For a chain, it's passable, but I wouldn't waste my time seeking out a location to visit.

• Pros: Reasonable prices, Good salad
• Cons: Crowded, Uninspired menu, Unreliable quality