The Food Critic Who Got Famous For Genuinely Loving Olive Garden

A food critic sounds like a dream job: get paid to wine and dine yourself through some of your area's best restaurants. Most of the time, you even get to bring a few friends. But what happens when you review a newly-opened Olive Garden — and love it? Well, North Dakota native Marilyn Hagerty found out firsthand. Her genuine review of the Italian chain's location near her city of Grand Forks, North Dakota back in 2012 wound up going viral due to what some would say was a surprisingly positive write-up.

While everyone's palate is different, Olive Garden isn't exactly the type of Italian restaurant that could stand up to Michelin-starred spots like New York City's Don Angie. The chain prides itself on classic Italian fare. However, through the years, it's earned the reputation of an Americanized Italian restaurant more known for its affordable pasta deals and bottomless breadsticks than its high-quality ingredients and traditional Italian techniques. But to Hagerty, everything was perfect.

Hagerty had no idea what happened when her restaurant review started garnering hundreds of thousands of views. In typical food critic fashion, she'd gone to review a newly opened Grand Forks restaurant — albeit a popular chain — and her online piece was suddenly bursting with nearly 300,000 clicks. In her review for the Grand Forks Herald, Hagerty referred to the new Olive Garden as "the largest and most beautiful restaurant now operating in Grand Forks," among other words of praise. Despite Olive Garden's large menu, she only ordered the chicken Alfredo.

The review received plenty of positive and negative feedback, which tends to be the case anytime anything goes viral. Journalism runs in Hagerty's family, as her late husband was the newspaper's editor for years, and her son is a Wall Street Journal reporter. With just about 58,000 residents, Grand Forks is a quiet city, meaning a chain restaurant opening up might be a pretty big deal to its residents.

Hagerty was 85 when her Olive Garden review became a viral sensation, and 11 years later, she's still writing for the Grand Forks Herald. Her pieces include lifestyle articles relating to the changing seasons. Based on her Grand Forks Herald author page, she doesn't seem to review restaurants quite as often as she once did. However, she covers town news, such as the local high school's graduating class and various events around Grand Forks.

The New York Times wrote a feature story on Hagerty when the pandemic struck back in 2020. At the time, Hagerty was 94 and still contributing three columns per week to the Herald (based on her author page, it appears to have dropped to two columns per week in 2023). In 2020, Hagerty once again visited the Grand Forks Olive Garden that made her famous, providing yet another Herald review of her trip. She ordered the same chicken Alfredo, but this time, she did have one critique: Her side salad didn't have enough olives.