Olive Garden Customer Orders a Drink But Soon Noticed One Major Issue With The Strawberry Topping

In restaurants, sometimes the visual appeal works like a key that can attract a customer to taste a dish. Take drink toppers, for instance. It could be a slim lemon slice, a wedged cucumber, or a cube of mango. But when a customer sees this little thing tucked to the mouth of the glass, the drink somehow becomes even more tantalizing, or refreshing, maybe. Olive Garden (OG), whose menu of drinks spans everything from Italian margaritas to sangrias and spritzers, follows the same decoration strategy.

However, in the case of one OG customer, this decoration turned into a disturbing experience. In a resurfaced TikTok video, a mom of three, Samy Nguyen (@samy.nguyen1), shared how a drink she ordered at the restaurant came with a moldy strawberry topper. The punchy red strawberry, which would have otherwise added a tang and glam to the drink, seemed to be playing a character in The Walking Dead, as many people said.

The video shows Nguyen’s table served with two glasses of the same beverage, most likely OG’s strawberry passion fruit lemonade. In each glass, the cola-colored drink is clinking with ice cubes and a black straw dipped into it. Nguyen’s husband hands her one of the glasses, and she flashes it on the camera to reveal an upsetting visual. The strawberry topping the glass is covered in mold. “When your husband doesn’t want to be the one complaining so he hands it to you to do the talking. C’mon #olivegarden, you could do better,” she captioned the video, which has been viewed more than 7 million times ever since.

In the comments section, viewers expressed a mixture of shock and comedy at this blatantly plain-sighted visual that the restaurant servers failed to notice, as if they were wondering that the strawberry would somehow resurrect itself on top of the glass. “Oh hell no! Not to be dramatic, but I’d leave and never go back,” said @glamourgloxo. @ashleyceledon commented, “The mold in plain sight would’ve made me lose my whole appetite.” @johnnyeyez78 quipped, “Gordon Ramsay would lose it,” in response to which, Nguyen tagged Ramsay’s official account. @rainbomohawk wrote, “That strawberry was not cut, it was shoved up on!”

Many people speculated that eating a moldy strawberry could have led her or her husband to the hospital. And although this is partly true, eating a moldy strawberry doesn’t have too dangerous effects, per Eating Well. If someone is allergic to molds, it can make them sick, but they’re unlikely to harm the person. The spores, which look like the white fluffy stuff on the berries, are a microscopic fungus. Cotton-candy-like spores penetrate the reddish flesh of the berry and start feeding on it, eating it up little by little from the inside.

Meanwhile, after people’s requests, Nguyen posted a follow-up video to share that she reached out to OG for an explanation of her unsettling dining experience. In the video, she displayed her phone screen with the reply message she had received from the restaurant. The message read, “The General Manager and the entire management will be working diligently to prevent this from happening again. Please give us a chance to provide you with a better experience. To help make things right, I am sending you a $25 gift card.”

Nguyen was disappointed at their response. “So this is what Olive Garden is trying to make right? Offering a $25 gift card? Like, are you guys missing a zero over here? But at this point, we don't even care,” she said. Despite the gross strawberry topper, she said her family didn’t leave the restaurant that day. Her three kids, all younger than 5, were hungry, and she had to feed them right there. Confessing how powerless she felt then, she grimaced, “We work so hard, like to go out and enjoy a meal, and the s**t happens. Should have just eaten at home.”

You can follow Samy Nguyen (@samy.nguyen1) on TikTok for lifestyle videos.