Olive Garden Fanfiction

About

Olive Garden Fanfiction refers to fanfiction written about the American Italian-food chain Olive Garden after a challenge was issued by a food reviewer on Twitter after she wrote an artistic and literary review of the chain.

Origin

On October 3rd, food critic Helen Rosner published a review of Olive Garden for Eater.com^[1] as the chain attempts to rebrand itself for a modern consumer marketplace. Her review delved into her personal relationship with the chain restaurant, as well as parsed out the theoretical and artistic value of Olive Garden's mundaneness and mediocrity. For example, Rosner wrote of Olive Garden, "It’s the ur-chain, a restaurant whose exquisite mediocrity -- heightened, not undermined, by the flashes of greatness in the toasted ravioli, the salad, the shockingly delicious soups -- is the very fabric of its appeal." She also wrote how because all Olive Garden's are fundamentally similar despite regional differences, "There is really only one Olive Garden, one Olive Garden that has a thousand doors."

Spread

Struck by the artistry of the review, Twitter user @drhypercube^[2] tweeted Rosner, "'There is only one Olive Garden, but it has a thousand doors.' One could hang a scifi/horror story off this line. (A+++)."

In response to that tweet, Rosner tweeted "Holy crap I will buy dinner for 4 at Olive Garden for anyone who writes a real short story with this as the opening line."^[3] She then tweeted some guidelines for her challenge, making sure she wanted the story to be about a world with one thousand-doored Olive Garden.

In response, Rosner has received at least nine pieces of fanfiction using the line "There is only one Olive Garden, but it has a thousand doors." as the opening sentence. The Daily Dot^[4] compiled some of excerpts from submissions and posted them on October 14th, 2017 (shown below).

The shell of the Olive Garden beast keeps each chamber apart, keeps the denizens from mingling, but the back of the beast runs through them all. It twists in those dark directions our three dimensional mind knows not. Ana and Kata, Ceriden and Quariden. It spins and turns, passing through vast holes in what, to our small minds, seem solid walls painted in yellow tones and festooned with fake rock slabs. --

Deborah looked away, the way she always did when she didn’t want to engage, and walked back to her table. She ate a breadstick, and drank a glass of red wine that tasted tangy on her tongue as she picked at the chicken alfredo she ordered. But afterwards, once she had paid the bill, she couldn’t help herself and went to look one more time. And that time, she took another turn into a second dining room she had missed before, and when she opened the door she saw the unmistakeable, flat vastness of a midwestern strip mall. --

We could interact with, but didn’t appear to be physically in the Olive Garden. It’s hard to explain. The staff and patrons paid us no mind as we ate their food, flipped their cups and put linguini on their heads. --

Search Interest

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External References