The best Italian restaurant in Las Vegas is.... Olive Garden! [View All]

Even in Vegas, chain restaurants hold charm
Yeah, there’s top-rated Tao, but we’ll take Olive Garden and In-N-Out, thank you
By Mike Trask

The biggest — and best-known — “best of” list comes courtesy of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which polled nearly 8,000 people this year to get the Readers’ Picks on all things Vegas.

One finding perhaps tells you all you need to know about the survey. The best Italian restaurant in Las Vegas, at least according to the masses, is — drum roll please — Olive Garden.

Search “chain restaurants” on Google and it asks whether you meant to search “Olive Garden.”

The love affair some people have with the “when you’re here you’re family” chain elicits rolled eyes from food critics who spend careers searching for such things as the perfect cold Senegalese soup and grilled foie gras. Yet chains are comforting places, much like the sweat pants and baseball hat you can wear inside them — even in a city like Las Vegas, increasingly hailed by glossy magazines as a dining destination, a top-three food city in the country right up there with New York and San Francisco.