A second Olive Garden restaurant is opening on the MS Coast. Here are the details.
It won’t be on the beach, but another Olive Garden restaurant is on the way to South Mississippi.
The original Olive Garden opened in 1994 on the Biloxi side of DeBuys Road at the Gulfport-Biloxi line. It was one of four restaurants there at the beach — along with Red Lobster, Landry’s Seafood House and Ryan’s Family Steak House — destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
An Olive Garden opened in September 2009 at The Promenade in D’Iberville, but customers continued to clamor for an Olive Garden in Biloxi or Gulfport.
The new one will open at the former O’Charley’s restaurant at 10510 U.S. 49 in Gulfport, north of I-10 and The Crossroads, according to Gulfport officials.
O’Charley’s in Biloxi also was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, which reduced the restaurant to a slab. Its location on U.S. 49 closed in July 2020, as one of the restaurants that wasn’t able to survive the closures and restrictions of the coronavirus pandemic.
This location is just north of where in 2008 executives with Darden Restaurants, parent company of Olive Garden, were hoping to build a new restaurant on the southwest corner of Landon Road and U.S. 49. That site was complicated with utility easements, according to an article in the Sun Herald.
Olive Garden has more than 850 restaurants nationwide listed on its website. The Gulfport site hasn’t been added yet.
The chain of restaurants is know for its all-you-can eat choice of soup plus salad and breadsticks for lunch and dinner, along with Italian dishes.
Every Olive Garden participates in the company’s Harvest program, where restaurants donate surplus food to local non-profit organizations.
This story was originally published October 20, 2021 at 11:10 AM.
