Vol. 6: Olive Garden's Stuffed Chicken Marsala

I've gone to Olive Garden for years now, though never as often as I'd like (hey, I don't get paid for this blog yet, you know).  I've never had anything really bad there, so I always feel free to try new things, unlike a few places I know which shall remain anonymous.

The Stuffed Chicken Marsala both sounded delicious and looked delicious on the menu.  A juicy chicken breast stuffed with cheeses and other goodies tossed in a creamy mushroom and Marsala wine sauce, served with their Tuscan mashed potatoes, also smothered in the sauce.. Yum!  With a little footnote saying this recipe was inspired by the gourmets at the Culinary Institute of Tuscany, hey, how could it go wrong?

All joking aside, the result is profoundly 'meh.'  The chicken itself, while indeed juicy, had no real flavor of its own.  The parts stuffed with cheeses had a different flavor, but in all honesty, the textural difference was unnervingly similar to chewing a big lump of chicken fat (the first bite almost made me gag before I realized it was cheese).  Even with that realization, the texture is still funny.  And textures play a larger role in enjoying food as a whole, even if you don’t realize it.. if you have a spoonful of pudding that tastes like a cheeseburger, it still won’t cure the urge for you to sink your teeth into a burger.  Plus, you’ll probably cringe at the combination in the first place.

The mushroom Marsala sauce is quite good, but the mashed potatoes seemed out of place.  Something about the dish begged for the chicken to be served on a bed of pasta, with the sauce running all through it.. While this may seem like largely an aesthetic complaint, the power of something feeling “out of place” has a big effect on a dish as a whole.  I like pickles, but I don't want any f*cking pickles on my spaghetti & meatballs, you know what I'm saying?  Of course, this isn't quite that drastic of a collision, but the potatoes does lend a hand to the whole dish feeling “off.”

At first I thought it was just my plate, that I'd gotten a bad apple, but another person in our party had the same dish, and the same resulting disappointment.  While nothing in this dish is actually bad, that also doesn't take away from the fact that there are no stellar qualities, either.  At the same token, just because a plain hot dog isn't bad doesn't make you actually want to eat it, either.  All in all, the fact that the best part of the meal was the breadstick dipped in Alfredo (now, that I would molest order again in a heartbeat) and the smell of the dish (which is amazingly better than the actual product) left me with a profoundly disappointed feel.

The Verdict

2/5.  I suppose if someone else paid for my lunch, I'd eat it.  Though you won't catch me ordering and paying for it again.