Comings and Goings....

Anybody who drives north on our Rte. 235 here in Lexington Park can’t help but notice the stone structure of the Olive Garden rising out of the once pretty field. Curtains now show in the windows, landscaping is going in (somewhat softening the massive yellow signs), and a couple of days ago I saw they now have a banner with our favorite two words: “Coming Soon” ~ Olive Garden. Seems sort of superfluous to me, I guess “they” must feel we can’t figure that out for ourselves. I also heard that the opening date is now moved up to 22 February, and by the looks of things, they might make it.

A few of the more vocal readers have taken me to task for being hard on the Olive Garden “even before it’s open!”. The problem is that I don’t have to wait for it to open, I’ve been there already. In St. Louis, in Onalaska, in…. you name it, once you’re in the door, you could be anywhere. The food is pre-processed, frozen, delivered from “somewhere”, cooked per formula and delivered to your table with varying degrees of skill (at least they can’t clone the waitstaff…yet). That’s the good and the bad of the place. You know exactly what you’re going to get if you order the Chicken Parm in St. Louis, the Fettucine Alfredo in Wisconsin, the Lasagna Classico in Waldorf, and that famous never ending salad bowl and breadsticks. It’s all the same. No surprises.

I guess what gets me about our “new” Olive Garden is that it is not “new”, it’s just another one. It’s what it represents that bothers me. Homogeneous, consistent, no imagination, grind it out food. Cooking should be adventurous to some extent. There are creative chefs who love to “play” with the food. That’s a bad term, but you know what I mean. They tweak a sauce; they combine different flavors, textures, and ingredients to give us something special. Oh, if it’s a success, it’ll remain on the menu for a while, but it will change and you can expect something new. You may not like a dish (we’ve trodden that ground before), but you may, and that’s why you find a locally owned restaurant with a chef you like and return. Now that the “buy local” movement is taking hold, each season brings fresh ingredients to incorporate (please), and there’s nothing like the feeling when you taste a new dish and go “wow”! That’s what it’s all about.

What sort of got me into this was that MFO was over in Leonardtown recently and saw the owner of Corbels apparently showing somebody the building. The contrast of the closing of a restaurant that does do the right things with food at the same time that another “chain” is opening up is somehow saddening to me. I’m not sure what it says about our area. I don’t know the ins and outs of why Corbels closed, but we lost an opportunity to enjoy creative food, and that’s a shame. One less reason to
DFD