Olive Garden Reviewer Marilyn Hagerty is Back! And This Time She's Been Short-Changed on Seafood.
Stop the presses! Marilyn Hagerty, perhaps the most famous food reviewer since Anton Ego, has returned to her Grand Forks, ND, Olive Garden, to pen an update—and this time around she's not quite as impressed.
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In the piece, published in the Grand Forks Herald, Hagerty is more critical about the chain's offerings than she was the first time. She also ruminates about how much her life has changed since she first critiqued the place—a move that gave the octogenarian columnist instant celebrity status one year ago.
“That was March 7, 2012, and my world has not been the same. I went viral, and I didn’t even know what that meant,” Hagerty, 86, writes in today’s review. “In the past year, I have learned.”
The reviewer, who has been with the paper since 1957, touched off a media circus with her first review of the new Olive Garden, a completely earnest rundown in which she called the eatery “impressive” and “the largest and most beautiful restaurant now operating in Grand Forks.” After eliciting an initial round of online mockery from foodies, the gracious Hagerty soon became the beloved star of TV interviews and even earned a prestigious journalism award.
“Last year it went to Katie Couric. Other winners have been Walter Cronkite and Garrison Keillor,” Hagerty wrote of receiving the Al Neuharth Award for Excellence in the Media last October.
Another accomplishment she crossed of her bucket list this year: judging "Top Chef." She served as a guest judge on the Bravo reality show not long after inking a book deal with Anthony Bourdain’s Ecco imprint. Hagerty's “Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 100 Reviews,” will be published on August 27.
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“What do I make of it? Not much,” she told Yahoo! Shine last year before providing tips on how to review a restaurant. "It is just a wild, interesting ride right now!”
In her follow-up review, published in her Eatbeat column Wednesday, Hagerty was not quite as starry eyed over the Olive Garden. Her mostly positive review, though, praised the chain for lunches that are “a very good buy,” vegetable soup that is “hearty and satisfying,” and chocolate mousse cake that’s “excellent.”
She also called food “predictable, down to the four or five black olives you find in the salad bowl” (though she doesn’t clarify whether that’s a plus or a minus), and declared the seafood in her penne di mare “a little hard to find.”
“No longer a novelty in Grand Forks, the Olive Garden has settled in,” she concluded. “It is constantly surrounded by cars and fares well in a restaurant area where there are two new eating places — Noodles & Co. and the Erbert and Gerbert’s.”
As for whether the novelty of Hagerty herself has worn off, the jury’s still out on that one. But for us? Not a bit.
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