Dealing with Mistakes-Olive Garden

I generally like Olive Garden, and they certainly aren't the worst at dealing with mistakes, but sometimes its fascinating to watch them try... I this case it started as a simple underdone steak and went down hill from there, though in the end they did the best they could to make up for it. One of the odd things was that they seemed to be way better at communicating with us as customers than with each other.

Underdone steak is almost to be expected unless you want really rare, then it will more likely be overdone. They all seem to specialize in medium to medium rare. They were going to reheat it, which would have been fine: my sister had cut the pieces open which would have made it easy to cook the centers and reheat the rest in the process. So they took it away. For unknown reasons, they decided that they should instead start from scratch on the steak, tossing the undercooked leftovers which we would have been happy to take home if we'd known how long it was going to take to start from scratch.

That which ended up taking longer than it took to get the original serving. The waitress handled it well, otherwise, even having the sense to bring our bill so that we didn't have to deal with that later, and brought us a to go box when we decided that the pasta the meat came with was enough. Meanwhile, the young manager also was checking with us, offered us free desert (salad and pasta was plenty filling so we declined) but obviously not talking to the waitress. He was going to not have us pay for the delayed steak, but we already had so he was nice and gave us a gift card instead. He thought the empty to-go box must have had the pasta in it, brought the steak in a to-go box, and said "here, to go with your pasta". It didn't even have some of the sauce that was supposed to go with the steak-on-pasta dish, just the steak, missing the point of the dish. (We're having it in chili today).

We took it all in stride and good humor. Fortunately, we had no place to be in particular and were happy to chat longer than we would have otherwise, drinking plenty of healthy water with lemon while we waited. Still, mistakes happen often enough at any restaurant--wrong dishes, mis-cooked steak, spilled soup--you'd think they would have some sort of standard protocol, and none of the restaurants seem to have a well-taught process or selection of processes to help the recovery. Big chains, especially, should be ready with a policy or a menu of options, because they know they are going to have to deal with them, even if smaller places might hope that they never have to.