Six Friends Settle On Lukewarm Italian Chain No One Wanted

Todd Miller, a 41-year-old project manager from Piscataway, New Jersey, confirmed Wednesday that the six friends had selected Olive Garden Italian Restaurant in the Staten Island Mall food court after a decision-making process that lasted seven weeks and produced no consensus. "We needed somewhere nobody could object to on principle," Miller said, seated in a booth at 6:47 p.m. on a Tuesday. The location sits precisely at the midpoint where nobody is satisfied but nobody leaves. Seating for the group had been reserved under Miller's name since Tuesday at 6:45.

The search had narrowed through elimination voting on a shared spreadsheet titled "DINNER OPTIONS (FINAL)." Twenty-three options were entered. By week three, the field had consolidated to six: a gastropub in Jersey City, a Venezuelan arepa stand, a tasting menu restaurant where the $185 prix fixe would require itemized justification to the group text, a Chinese place that had closed in 2019 but remained on Google Maps, a sushi spot one member had never tried and another member's ex-boyfriend managed, and Olive Garden. No restaurant advanced to the next round after winning a vote. Each advanced after failing to accumulate enough objections to remove it.

By the final vote on Monday evening, the spreadsheet's comment column had grown to 847 rows. The Venezuelan option had been eliminated after Carla Duchesne noted the portions were too generous. The gastropub lost when Marcus Webb observed that gastropubs could not be trusted. The closed restaurant was removed, technically, but only after three weeks of what Miller described as "good-faith research into whether it had quietly reopened." The sushi restaurant's elimination required a full group call, after which nobody spoke for seventeen minutes.

The six friends arrived between 6:52 and 7:04 p.m. Three ordered the Tour of Italy. Two ordered variations on the same pasta. One ordered soup and a salad. "It's not that it's bad," said Jennifer Kim, 39, a loan processor who had initially advocated for the Venezuelan option before withdrawing the nomination on grounds of personal doubt. "It's that we didn't have to care about any of this." Her brother Robert Kim, 37, nodded while applying parmesan to an already-salted dish. The breadsticks arrived at 7:11. By 7:14, the group had stopped trying to make conversation and had begun trying to stop not-talking from becoming awkward.

The reservation was booked for 7:30 p.m. The group vacated at 8:47. Webb left his card and a cash tip. Nobody asked to split it more equitably. The walk to the parking lot took eleven minutes because nobody wanted to arrive at their car at the same moment as the others. On Wednesday morning, Miller sent a group text saying "That was great." Four members read it. Two members read it and did not respond. The search for a next dinner venue is scheduled to begin in approximately six months, or never, Miller said, whichever comes first.