Olive Garden in particular's worse than middle-high tier frozen Italian food in a bag, which comes out to the same price or cheaper. Certain dishes are worse th

Olive Garden in particular's worse than middle-high tier frozen Italian food in a bag, which comes out to the same price or cheaper. Certain dishes are worse than budget frozen Italian food that can be prepped in its container, a microwave. Granted you have to do some work for those but it's usually "heat in pan, serve" or similar. It used to be better (like, 10+ years ago) but has gotten quite a bit worse. Maybe a few dishes are better than that, but none of the ones I've ordered when I've gone in the last decade or so—one gets invited, and a place has to be damn bad before they go on my "I will risk being rude to avoid going here, and will not take the food for free" list. Kinda like how up to a few years ago Noodles & Company was pretty good cheap food, then they doubled all their portion sizes and their food unaccountably dropped to sub-frozen-and-boxed-food quality levels and they started calling themselves "World Kitchen" or something.