'Cobra Kai' Olive Garden is Where I Draw the Line

Photo credit: Netflix
Photo credit: Netflix

Sit down. I'm gonna come in hot here. I fuckin' love myself some Olive Garden. I'm serious. I've toured Italy more times than I can count. Had so much wedding soup that I could probably fill a bathtub with it. I willingly induce explosive diarrhea, time after time, just so I can have the five cheese ziti. Pay for my tattoo of an Olive Garden breadstick, with little steaming squiggles coming out of the ends, and I'll get it right now. OG 4 lyfe, baby. Come at my suburban Olive Garden—Greentree, PA, the GOAT—and I will defend it with my very life.

And still, I was not ready to encounter my pleasure, my pain, my sweet plot of decadent olives in Cobra Kai this weekend. Precisely 180 seconds into Season Five, Episode Five, we see the rustic exterior of an Olive Garden. Turn out that, in an effort to make Robby and Miguel best friends, Johnny invited the two for a come-to-Jesus at the Italian (okay, "Italian") mecca. They're pissed about it! Ungrateful brats. Then, an Olive Garden waiter named Henry shows up and starts ranting about the ravioli. Cobra Kai makes a damn caricature out of him. Robby blurts, "Breadsticks aren't gonna fix this." (No, Robby, they will.) Johnny quips back, "One bite and you'll forget why you were ever mad in the first place. The boys end up getting takeout. At the end of the episode, the trio all take a bite of a breadstick, in unison. Robby says, with the earnestness of that little baby bear who brags that Charmin makes his nasty hiney clean, "Wow! You weren't kidding about these breadsticks, dad!"

Golly gee, bitch! I call bullshit.

You know, I can't prove, at this time, whether or not the scene in question is sponsored content. If it is? I'd like to say, to both Cobra Kai and Olive Garden—that you're both better than this. This isn't like the Applebee's scene in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, where it's part of the joke, that the Bobby fam is having this big hoorah at an Applebee's, treating it like they're at Ruth's Chris. No. There's some humor going on in Cobra Kai, but I actually believe, in my heart of hearts, that money was transferred here, with the intent of Johnny Lawrence earnestly speaking about the healing power of breadsticks.

Don't do my breadsticks like that, Olive Garden. Or else my next piece will be about how much more I loved the Red Lobster cheddar bay biscuits the whole time.

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