Photograph by Steven Senne/AP

The last time people got excited about Olive Garden was in 2012, when Marilyn Hagerty, an eighty-five-year-old reviewer at a North Dakota newspaper, penned an earnest rave about the “warm and comforting” chicken alfredo and the restaurant’s “impressive” decor. The article went viral.

Social media hath given, and social media hath taken away. Over the past couple of days, another assessment of Olive Garden has been making the rounds on Facebook and Twitter. The author is Starboard Value, an activist investment firm that owns shares of Darden, Olive Garden’s parent company, and is trying to win control of its board. Inside a detailed plan of nearly three hundred pages describing what Starboard would do if it were in charge is a section describing all that’s wrong with the restaurant.

It’s as if Starboard wrote it with Twitter in mind. The investors—or their representatives, in any case—visited a bunch of Olive Gardens and concluded, for one thing, that the breadsticks taste “similar to hot dog buns.” The chicken-topped vegetable lasagna makes no sense: “if you wanted meat on your lasagna, you would order the meat lasagna.” The crispy Parmesan asparagus: “anything but.” As for the pasta itself, don’t get these critics started. “Shockingly, Olive Garden no longer salts the water it uses to boil the pasta, merely to get a longer warranty on its pots,” they write, resulting in “a mushy, unappealing product.” (Darden executives didn’t respond to the details of the plan, but Gene Lee, its president and chief operating officer, said, in a press release, that the company “will carefully and thoughtfully review Starboard’s plan” but that it feels many of Starboard’s ideas “are already being implemented across our company and are showing results.”)

Olive Garden is Darden’s flagship restaurant, but its sales have been falling. To be fair, the slowdown isn’t unique to Olive Garden. Casual-dining restaurants in general—places like Chili’s, T.G.I. Friday’s, and Red Lobster—have been struggling for a couple of reasons. First, people are spending less time at the mall, where a lot of these places are located, because they’re shopping online instead. (As Amy Merrick wrote, in March, “The case for Amazon is pretty strong when the alternative is to crawl through gridlock to a mall, unwittingly park in the space farthest from the store you plan to visit, cringe as toddlers’ shrieks reverberate off the tile floors, and dodge salesmen hawking knockoff perfumes and hundred-dollar curling irons.”) Also, with incomes falling for low- and middle-income people over the past couple of years, consumers have gravitated toward restaurants like Chipotle and Panera—more on the higher-end than fast food, but cheaper and more casual than sit-down chains.

Still, as Starboard points out, rightly, Olive Garden’s sales have been particularly dismal. It’s the third-biggest restaurant chain of its kind, by sales (Applebee’s and Chili’s are No. 1 and No. 2, respectively), but, while its sales fell by four per cent last year, three of the top five—Applebee’s, IHOP, and Outback Steakhouse—actually saw their sales rise. And Olive Garden’s biggest competitor in Italian food, a smaller chain called Carrabba’s, also grew.

So what’s the deal with Olive Garden? To hear Starboard tell it, the place isn’t Italian enough anymore. (Aside from such travesties as fried lasagna bites, in December, Olive Garden added an “Italiano burger” to its menu, prompting the “Daily Show” to tweet, “Because nothing says Italian cuisine like a sandwich named after a German city.”) Besides the business of unsalted water, Starboard argues that the chain has lost relationships with the Italian suppliers it had used in the past; it tried to push wasteful two-for-one entrée deals that are “inconsistent with Italian culture”; and it doesn’t encourage diners to order wine, though everyone knows that Italians love their vino.

The Olive Garden at the Stonestown Galleria Mall, in San Francisco, is two doors down from a Chipotle, but, on Friday afternoon, it was nearly full. The view: a sun-drenched field of parked automobiles. The music: Muzak. A waiter was overheard suggesting that a patron try the chicken and gnocchi soup, which was similar, he explained, to a clam chowder. Tuscany, this was not. Yet, I sat below an image of a lovely, tree-lined country road, that, if not Italian, could credibly have been, and my server did suggest wine, if abashedly. (“Do you want anything to drink? A glass of wine or?”) I saw the chicken-veggie lasagna on the menu, which might have appealed to me. But Starboard’s criticism, like all well-written negative reviews, had gotten in my head: if I wanted meat on my lasagna, I would have ordered meat lasagna, I thought, and instead requested a salad (good, if light on the olives) and a sausage, kale, and potato soup (decent, light on the kale). The breadsticks came out warm and wet with butter; I can report that they did not, to my taste, recall hot-dog buns. I also ordered the fettucine alfredo and the crispy asparagus. The fettucine was flavorful enough for me, salt or not, though I am sorry to say that, on the asparagus, Starboard was right.

For a diner, I’m all for Starboard’s plan: crispier asparagus would have been nice, and, if it had been really important to my server that I order a glass of wine, I would have gladly obliged. For investors in Darden, the plan will be harder to evaluate. While the Olive Garden section of the presentation focusses on making meals more Italian, in part by using more traditional Italian ingredients, another portion of the plan urges Olive Garden to lower food costs. Though Starboard is sure that Darden can do both at once, the goals seem to be at odds with each other. From a financial standpoint, maybe Olive Garden would do better to trim costs here and there—Starboard suggests serving fewer breadsticks and smaller salads, along with pulling back on the two-for-one deals—and not get too ambitious with its efforts at authenticity. For many customers, an Italianate façade might be good enough. On Friday, when I finished my meal, the check came to twenty-six dollars with tip, and I left with a bag of leftovers and a mint. The foil that enwrapped the mint read, “Grazie!” and this pleased me. I had to search online to discover that the mint itself, an Andes, was straight from Tootsie Roll Industries, of Chicago.