I tried Olive Garden in Lansing with my host family.

The appetizer kinda looks Italian, we had the Spinach-artichoke dip and I never had in Italy before but it was good, then some breadsticks with alfredo sauce cost, we have breadsticks in Italy but they are more crunchier than this bread, they are not soft.

On the menu a lot of meals included alfredo sauce and we don’t have it at all in Italy. Some meals on the menu were absolutely not Italian like chicken and Shrimp Carbonara, Carbonara is a very famous meal in Italy, it has to be make with eggs, pecorino cheese and pancetta that is very different from bacon, and their carbonara was made with chicken and shrimp and also with a creamy sauce with bacon and roasted red pepper, nothing in this pasta is what it should be. There was lasagna, ravioli, asiago tortellini alfredo with grilled chicken, if we eat something like this we usually don’t put meat on it, if we eat the meal we do after, like a second meal. Something like grilled Chicken Margherita is something you’ll never find in Italy, also Chicken Scampi, because you shouldn’t mix the taste of fish with meat, if you are eating fish you shouldn’t eat meat in the same meals. One of my biggest disappointments as an Italian was the fake Carbonara and the gnocchi, they put them in a soup, in Italy we absolutely do not do it, we eat them with butter and basil or with tomato sauce, you can basically eat them with every type of sauce, it’s more like pasta for us, and I love gnocchi so I was surprised. But they also have some Italian ingredients like the parmesan but the one you have to grate, we basically prefer to eat that one above the one you already buy grated.

I actually don’t know a lot about wine so I have no idea if the one they have was really Italian, if it was a good one; but they had no Italian beers.

We didn’t have dessert because we were too full, but they looked good. There was Tiramisu, which is a typical Italian dessert, Sicilian cheesecake with strawberry topping.

I ate Shrimp Scampi, it was really good and it kinda felt like something that could be a meal in Italy. 

The restaurant was clean, pretty, and the waitresses were nice. We didn’t wait long for our food, everything was hot.

The food was really good but I also tried the soup with gnocchi and that was awful. It may be because I’m not used to eating it in that way, anyway the food was really good it wasn’t just really Italian, but food doesn’t need to be Italian to be good. If I have to rate it from 1 to 5, it’s like 3.5 because the food was really good.