Olive Garden

Some people can be downright rude, one North Dakota restaurant reviewer learned this week. Not to mention snobby.  The story pits urbanites with endless culinary options against a prairie town with slim pickings. Marilyn Hagerty's review of a new Olive Garden in Grand Forks, N.D., seems to have struck a nerve among some city slickers. In an earnest, utilitarian column for the Grand Forks Herald, Hagerty wrote about the decor, the ambiance and the low-fat entrees available to those counting calories.

Staying on a diet while eating out is getting easier as more restaurant chains offer menu items that don't break the calorie bank. The newest entrant is the Daily Grill, which just debuted its Simply 600 menu. The lunch and dinner items , which are 600 calories or less, include a blackened ahi tuna salad (319 calories), a pan-seared salmon burger (554 calories), fish tacos (548), a Thai noodle chicken salad (472) and chicken meatballs with angel hair pasta (590 calories). Fat grams were not revealed.

Poor sales at the Olive Garden chain are weighing on Darden Restaurants Inc., which saw earnings slide 28% in its second quarter on the Italian eatery's poor performance. Net income fell to $53.7 million, or 40 cents a share, from $74.5 million, or 53 cents, a year earlier. Revenue for the quarter, which ended Nov. 27, was up 6.1% to $1.83 billion. Olive Garden's shaky footing has been throwing Orlando, Fla.-based Darden off balance for a while and the chain needs to get "back on track," executives said.

First Lady Michelle Obama's anti-obesity campaign scored a win Thursday when the parent company of Red Lobster and Olive Garden signed on to cut calories and sodium in its menu items over the coming decade. At an Olive Garden in the D.C. suburbs, Obama stood with the chief executive of Darden Restaurants as he announced plans to cut calories and sodium by 20% and to improve children's menus -- partly by making fruits and vegetables the "default" side dish. Obama's "Let's Move" campaign doesn't try to change laws or regulations, but Thursday's event showed the first lady wielding the tool she does have -- public exposure.

First Lady Michelle Obama gave her support Thursday to healthful menu changes at Darden Restaurants, the parent company of mega-chains such as Olive Garden and Red Lobster. The company announced Thursday  it's cutting calories and sodium in all of its restaurants, offering more healthful choices on its kids' menus and revamping other food choices. Obama spoke at a news conference held at an Olive Garden restaurant in Hyattsville, Md., in which Darden Chairman and Chief Executive Clarence Otis outlined changes the company's restaurants will make.

The gig: Chairman and chief executive of Darden Restaurants Inc., which operates Olive Garden, Red Lobster and other sit-down casual-dining chains. Raised in Los Angeles, Otis, 54, has spent the last 15 years with the Orlando, Fla., concern and helped guide it through boom times and two recessions. He is one of the nation's few African American CEOs who run a Fortune 500 company. Family matters: Wife is Jacqueline Bradley, a former executive of corporate banking at SunTrust and now a stay-at-home mother.

"Contains lettuce" is not synonymous with "good for you. " Driving home this point in headline-grabbing (or blog-grabbing) fashion is yet another list from the "Eat This, Not That" series. From the 650-calorie, 1,450-milligrams-of-sodium chicken Caesar salad (No. 20) at Romano's Macaroni Grill to the 1,800-calorie Santa Fe chopped salad (the winner at No. 1) at TGI Fridays, these salads are not to be trifled with. If you don't feel like clicking through the side-show format of this list --  20 Salads Worse Than a Whopper  -- or want to check out a particular salad at a particular restaurant chain, try the company's website or the restaurant list at Calorie Count . The latter helpfully advises that one serving of Olive Garden's garden fresh salad has 350 calories.

Doing business over food is sacred in Hollywood, with lunch as the most stalwart form of schmoozing. Or is it? Though nobody is predicting empty 1 p.m. tables at the Grill on the Alley anytime soon, there's reason to believe that Lunch as We Know It may be approaching a tipping point, what with the looming writers' strike and the eclipse of dining institutions such as Morton's, which will close later this year.

Cheesecake Factory Inc. said Tuesday that its cheesecakes contaminated with the potentially deadly listeria bacteria may have been served to Olive Garden customers at 19 restaurants in the Midwest and the South. The news could stain the Calabasas Hills-based chain's reputation and eventually hurt its sales and stock, some analysts said.

One way to tell if a restaurant is part of a corporate chain is to look at the amount of printed matter it generates. Themes are another dead giveaway. In the case of the Olive Garden, which recently opened in Oxnard, they've latched onto the fall theme of "Roman pasta holiday" and practically printed it to death. They even designed paper covers for their flower vases to go along with the theme. To top it off, every bill comes with a customer questionnaire.