Hope you had a good weekend! — Dan

Grand Forks, North Dakota is the third-most populous city in the state, which is to say, it’s not all that big. Just under 60,000 people live there — less than San Marcos, California; Johns Creek, Georgia; Flower Mound, Texas; and a lot of other places you’ve never heard of unless you live near them. Grand Forks, as you’d imagine, is a rather generic American town — hardly one you’d think of going to if you wanted a great meal, or for that matter, anything other type of unique, elevated experience.

Which is why it’s so strange that the book, cover pictured below, exists.

In case you can’t see the image for some reason, the book is titled “Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 128 Reviews,” and it’s written by Marilyn Hagerty. Hagerty was a lifelong newspaper columnist at the Grand Forks Herald, first picking up a pen there in 1957 and working until 2024. By 1976, she was reviewing local restaurants for the paper, and in 1986, that became a core part of her efforts — her column, “Eatbeat,” debuted that year and continued for decades thereafter.

Her restaurant reviews were, understandably, intended for local audiences — even today, the Grand Forks Herald has a circulation of only about 15,000. So it made perfect sense, that, on March 6, 2012, Hagerty wrote a story about the newest restaurant to come to town — an Olive Garden. If you’re not familiar with Olive Garden, it’s an Italian-inspired causal dining restaurant chain with more than 900 locations, primarily in the United States — and, while not a bad choice for a meal, it’s hardly something worth writing about.

But Hagerty, of course, thought otherwise. Her story heralds (sorry) the Grand Forks instance as a “long-awaited” addition to the town that initially attracted long lines. She called the establishment “impressive” and described the food as “comforting,” the portion size “generous,” and praised the “warmth” of the décor. Hagerty noted that she looked forward to trying the raspberry lemonade on a hot summer day in the future. And near the close of her piece, she described the Olive Garden as a boon for her city: “All in all, it is the largest and most beautiful restaurant now operating in Grand Forks. It attracts visitors from out of town as well as people who live here.”

For this, many online mocked her — an 85-year-old woman, living in a small, forgettable city, making a big to-do over an Olive Garden? How… ridiculous. Hagerty’s article was shared far and wide — mostly by those gently (and sometimes not so gently) mocking her. And the mainstream press took note. Hagerty was interviewed on air by ABC News and CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and others. And as she told Today, she was surprised by the reaction — she saw herself more as a reporter than a critic: “I like to tell my readers how much things cost, how clean the place is, how the food tastes.” But the jokes kept coming — Hagerty’s next column, about a local Ruby Tuesday also went viral for similar reasons.

And then an unexpected ally stepped in: Anthony Bourdain. The famously sharp-tongued chef and author had built a career skewering bland chain restaurants and culinary pretension alike. And as CBS News reported, he — at first — was likely to join the snarky pile-on, but Hagerty’s response to the pushback impressed him: “Bourdain said his first instinct was to sneer at the review, but he called her reaction ‘dignified.’” Bourdain also realized that Hagerty’s decades of columns were a glimpse into Americana — most of us live in small cities or towns, or, at least, go there for dinner. And columns like Hagerty’s capture our lived experiences in ways that reviews of high-end restaurants in New York and LA never will.

So, Bourdain offered to turn Hagerty’s columns into a book — the cover of which is above. He even wrote the foreword, which you can read, here.

As of this writing, Hagerty’s book has 4.5 stars on 170 reviews on Amazon and averages 3.7 stars across more than 400 reviews on Goodreads.

You're spending 40 hours a week writing code that AI could do in 10.

While you're grinding through pull requests, 200k+ engineers at OpenAI, Google & Meta are using AI to ship faster.

How?

The Code newsletter teaches them exactly which AI tools to use and how to use them.

Here's what you get:

Sign up and get access to the Ultimate Claude code guide to ship 5X faster.

Join 200K+ engineers

Today’s Bonus fact: For a long time, Olive Garden was known for its offer of unlimited breadsticks — as long as you and your party were at the dinner table, servers would keep bringing them over, free. But that perk turned out badly for the leaders of Darden Restaurants, Olive Garden’s parent company. In the fall of 2014, a hedge fund named Starboard acquired a large number of shares of Darden and, in hopes of improving the company’s financials, tried to replace the company’s board. Per Fortune, one of Starboard’s “top complaints focused on the company’s all-you-can-eat breadsticks, which Darden said were too plentiful and lacked flavor.’ Shareholders agreed with Starboard and voted to fire the entire board of directors. The breadsticks, however, are still free and unlimited.

From the Archives: The Sesame Seed Backlash of 2023?: Why Olive Garden and some other restaurants added a tiny bit of sesame flour to some of their recipes.

Now I Know is supported by readers like you. Yes, you! Many of my readers donate a few dollars a month to help Now I Know grow and thrive. And in exchange, they get an ad-free version!

Interested in supporting Now I Know? Click here!

And thanks! — Dan