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Olive Garden stays in business because in many small towns it's the only option for dine-in Italian food. It also still has a "fine dining" perception in some of these areas. I've known people who dress up to go to Olive Garden and it's even a popular place to propose.
I think that was sort of a 90's thing back in the day they were like the first chain to be sort of kind of considered nice.
A lot of Italian restaurants are terrible they're just relying on their family name from back in the 50's. Grandma's old secret sauce isn't always so special just no one ever had the heart to tell her. So places like Olive Garden were a draw for some people.
The changing of the restaurant scene is tied in with how suburbs and so on evolved and grew over the past 30 years.
Last edited by wanderlust76; 06-06-2017 at 02:07 PM..
Maybe its going back to the old days. When I was growing up, we hardly ever went out to dinner. We had our meals at home. That seems to have changed in the last few decades with everyone going out (families included) much more frequently. Home meals were much less common.
I do not blame millennials for for the trouble of these types of restaurants. It is just changing preferences which tend to be cyclical. If not for changing preferences (from my youth), these places would not have existed in the numbers they have in the recent decades.
We must be the same age. It was back in the late 50s and early 60s we might have gone out to dinner may be once a year as a family and that's all.
I guess it makes sense, those places are more for the family experience they should cater more to older patrons like Denny's does.
As an Millennial, I actually like sit down places.
I don't think it's fair to blame this all on Millennials. I prefer casual dining, I prefer delivery if I'm going to get restaurant food. Even the Chinese place that has a sit down near me, I still prefer to order to go. Mostly, though, I'd prefer to make stuff at home because it is way less expensive, and if you get on to YouTube and start searching, you can make just about anything but you also know who has handled that food, where it's been, how long it's been there, etc. Bonus points.
If I take the time to go to a sit down restaurant, which is extremely rare, it's sure going to be a lot nicer than Applebee's or Olive Garden. Mainly because while the food is edible, it's really not that fabulous. I have never been to one of these places and said, after taking a bite of food, "OMG! This is so good!"
As for Denny's...I always viewed that as the place to go after a night of drinking, not a family restaurant.
No millennial here but I despise all those chain restaurants, not of which serve fresh quality food. If I'm going to dine out, it's going to be at a restaurant that serves local farm to table food, without all the salt, preservatives, and other crap in most chain restaurants. But then, our family has always cooked at home. We didn't grow up on fast food and never developed a taste for it.
It wouldn't be a bad thing if they killed off Buffalo Wild Wings.
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