After 23 years as a food critic, I finally reviewed the polarizing Olive Garden

Apparently, there are two kinds of people in the world: People who love Olive Garden and people who love to make fun of people who love Olive Garden.

That's the impression I got from social media after it was announced that an Olive Garden would open on Cincinnati's west side, writes the restaurant critic for The Cincinnati Enquirer, which is part of the USA TODAY Network. (Turns out it's not happening after all.) Some people were pretty excited, others expressed contempt for their excitement.

This is not new: Does anyone remember the flap of 2012 when Marilyn Hagerty of Grand Forks, North Dakota, reviewed the first Olive Garden in town and got rotten tomatoes thrown at her from around the country?

What I thought was, "I really ought to go to an OG." I had never been. Well, I'd never had dinner there. Once, I went for lunch because they had something called stuffed spaghetti and I had to see what that could possibly be. But this is one the most popular restaurant chains in the country.

I write about restaurants, I should have had dinner there by now.

I didn't quite do this on purpose, but I went with two people who spend a lot of time in Italy. "What exactly are we doing here?" my Latin-teacher friend asked. They brought a friend who actually is from Italy. He was a very polite Italian, and we had a wonderful time, yes, partly laughing at the Italian nachos made with pasta chips, meat sauce and jalapeños and the incredibly sweet moscato wine we were offered a taste of, but also the good feeling you get when eating and drinking and having someone wait on you.

I can certainly say that I'm not one of that first kind of people. Given the choice, I would never spend my own money at an Olive Garden, unless friends wanted to. But I can't really bring myself to be part of that other group.

Because isn't disdain for each other part of what's gone wrong lately all around us? A constant judging of each other, elites vs. regular Joes, fancy pants people who like escarole vs. people who think they're Real Americans who eat burgers from the drive-through. People who think they're foodies because they watch "Top Chef" and eat out a lot vs. people who cook dinner for their families but use convenience foods to do it. People who look down on others, and people who just suspect others are looking down on them. There are plenty of things to divide us, let's just leave food out of it.

Maybe we could all sit down over pasta fagioli, the salad that is, yes, iceberg, but has a nice light dressing on it, big plates of pappardelle with Bolognese, because it's pretty good, and eat endless soft, garlic-brushed breadsticks together, find some common ground and end up sharing their good tiramisu. Because everybody likes comfort and carbohydrates and fresh-grated parmesan cheese. And that's the bedrock appeal of Olive Garden. We'll just have to stay away from the fried lasagna and the "make your own lasagna rollatini."

Maybe the difference is just between people who like to think about what they're eating, reading, watching; then put it in context and apply their principles to it — and people who just take each thing as it comes.

I'm a thinker, and I can't quite get over OG's elaborate phony attempts to seem like it's actually an Italian restaurant. It is not, and I thought we could all agree on that.

But my new Italian friend told me this story as we drank our sweet spiked strawberry lemonades. When he first moved here, an Italian couple who'd been here awhile invited him for dinner and gave him advice about living here. They told him that, eventually, someone was going to say, "Oh, you're Italian? I should take you to Olive Garden." Don't go there, they said. It's a trap.

That has, in fact, happened to him.

I'm totally down with spaghetti and meatballs and huge bowls of pasta and other Italian-American dishes, which also get foodie shade. Those were created in the real cultural context of Italian immigration. OG's menu comes from the context of a marketing department. No number of photos of the Tuscan countryside can change that. It's not even trying to recreate something, like, say, Buca di Beppo does.

Nothing at OG is touched by the recent thinking of people who think about food. There's no local sourcing, there's no respect for a food culture, and Lord knows, no concession to healthy eating. Except the calorie counts are on the menu, so you know just how unhealthy it is. (Independent restaurants don't have to do this, so I'm not saying they're definitely better on this count.)

They do have an under-600 calories section of the menu from which I ordered shrimp scampi on angel hair (boiled well past al dente) with a lot of garlic and lemon. It had good flavor. Unlike the chicken marsala, which didn't yield any flavor at all to my chewing.

I'd like to suggest some Cincinnati, locally-owned Italian restaurants to try instead of Olive Garden. Forno, Sotto, A Tavola are all so good. But each one offers a certain challenge or barrier to someone just looking for something comfortable to eat.

It's not just the parking or the price. (OG is not notably cheap, though it may be perceived as cheaper.) It's that there are no words you can't understand on the Olive Garden menu. There is no chance the server will intimidate you. You can ask for sweet wine without embarrassment. There are lots of comfortable tables, and if you bring your kids, that's fine, though they also do a nice job of making it feel upscale enough for a date.

So let's just let everyone like what they like. And maybe independent restaurants should learn a thing or two from the popular chains.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Olive Garden: Menu and atmosphere are comfortable, food critic says