Olive Garden in Owensboro Kentucky: Delicious!

Olive Garden’s Chicken Gnocchi Soup

If you’re wondering where you should eat lunch in Owensboro, I have two words for you: Olive Garden. As I’ve mentioned on the Kentucky blog many times, my oldest daughter Emily and I eat lunch out each and every Friday.  Sometimes my husband/her dad is able to get off work long enough to join us and sometimes her sisters make it.  However, the one constant is this: Em and I do not miss Friday lunch out…. or our trip to Target and Starbucks afterward.

We kind of have a system we’ve developed over the years.  We’ll have lunch at Olive Garden one week, then branch out to a new restaurant the next Friday. Then we’ll return to Olive Garden the next… etc. If it weren’t for loving variety AND wanting to do a lot of Where to Eat in Owensboro Kentucky reviews, I can’t promise that we wouldn’t just head to Olive Garden each and every Friday.

I have to tell you, Owensboro’s Olive Garden may well be the best Olive Garden in the country.  I certainly haven’t eaten at all of their locations, so I can’t say with all certainty that they’re the best, however, our Olive Garden is flawlessly beautiful and beautifully flawless… so imagining another one beating them is pretty unreasonable.

How do you beat flawless?

So what do I love so much about Olive Garden at lunchtime?  To put it simply: They hit all the marks.

Olive Garden’s Zupa Soup

Below are the things I want and expect from a restaurant at lunchtime:

• Cleanliness
• Friendly host or hostess who seem genuinely glad to see you
• Friendly and helpful servers who seem genuinely glad to have you at their table
• UN FLAT diet coke, cokes, etc.
• Great tea
• Wonderful bread
• Wonderful salad
• Plenty of choices
• Healthy choices
• Reasonable prices – you get what (or more than what) you paid for
• Speed – who wants to spend precious time waiting?

Owensboro’s Olive Garden is all over each of these – as I said, They hit all the marks. The lunch menu is delicious, healthy, and unbelievably filling.  When we have lunch at Olive Garden, we’re always completely full until supper.  Their Soup, Salad, and Bread sticks lunch special is “all you can eat,” and so ridiculously delicious you will, indeed, eat all you can…. and then some.  Each of the soups are outstanding, but I’m so addicted to the Chicken and Gnocchi that I get it each time. You have no idea how much I’d love a bowl right now as I’m typing these words!

In addition to the best soups imaginable, delicious bread sticks, and my favorite salad in town, Olive Garden also has ridiculously beautiful and delicious appetizers (Could I interest you in Smoked Mozzarella Fonduta maybe???), pastas, flat breads, paninis (grilled sandwiches) and more.  There’s a Grilled Steak and Porotbello Panini with my name all over it. The paninis are served with your choice from their exceptional soups and Heavenly salad.

We have many wonderful places to eat lunch here in Owensboro, but Olive Garden sets the bar.  I have never had a hostess or host that wasn’t genuinely warm and friendly and I’ve never had a server who was less than a 10.  Not even a 9 -1/2!They ooze class and friendliness and represent the restaurant the way a restaurant would want to be represented.

The food is always impeccable, flawless in every conceivable way.

As you know, I take my Kentucky Restaurant Reviews and restaurant recommendations SERIOUSLY.  I would hate (with every fiber in my being) to steer someone in a direction that could prove to be a bad experience for them.  That’s what I love so much about places like Olive Garden – I know, beyond a shadow of doubt, that they’ll never let me or my beloved readers down.  When it comes to restaurants, they don’t just set the bar, they set it high.

See Olive Garden’s awesome lunch menu.

EDIT 4/6/2015: The same daughter I mentioned above (Emily) and I have BOTH had to start eating gluten/wheat free due to health reasons. You’ll see less Olive Garden lunch reviews and pictures on the blog now simply because we can no longer eat the soups we were so addicted to! Suffice to say, however, that Olive Garden is still one of the absolute best restaurants in Owensboro for lunch or dinner. Even if you, too, have to eat gluten free, they do have a gluten free pasta now.

Unfortunately, their lunch menu isn’t very gluten free friendly… yet. I’m hoping they’ll take care of this really soon and, when they do, I’ll come back here and edit my edit!

Owensboro’s Olive Garden is located at 5204 Frederica Street.