I'm pretty amused to find this thread. I travel throughout the US these days for meetings and I judge how civilized a town is by whether I can find an Olive Garden there :-) I've been to about 40 or 50 of them in different cities / towns. It's a running joke on facebook when I check in at one of them. My Italian friends yell in Italian (I'm assuming its cursing) and then some other friends simply are envious. They left Ontario (Canada) a number of years ago; couldn't make any money competing against the local firms it seems. I wish they'd come back we used to have fun going there in my late teens and early twenties with friends.

I get there's better quality food out there, but the tour of Italy does it for me with a couple breadsticks. Can't usually even eat it all.