Pricey Restaurant Chain Fig & Olive Exposed Using Pre-Made Frozen Food

Their $26 truffle risotto was shipped in from a central commissary.

Most people hitting up the McDonald's drive-thru are probably well aware of the fact that their McNuggets are not freshly made on-site, but rather manufactured in a far-off factory and shipped in frozen. But when diners are shelling out $41 for Chilean seabass, they generally expect that there's an actual chef in a real kitchen doing actual cooking.

That apparently isn't the case at Fig & Olive, a swanky Mediterranean restaurant with eight locations that include Washington DC, Chicago, New York's high-dollar Fifth Avenue, and Newport Beach, Calif. Instead, the company produces hundreds of menu components at a central commissary kitchen in Long Beach, N.Y. and ships them refrigerated or frozen to each of its restaurant outposts where they're then heated and served, the Washington City Paper revealed today.

The alt-weekly acquired a copy of the commissary's master recipe book, which offers a telling look at just how much of Fig & Olive's menu comes pre-prepared: Included is everything from avocado-basil tapenade and "carrot puree emulsion" to grilled vegetables and crab cakes. Step one of the restaurant's instructions for preparing a dish of truffle mushroom croquettes instructs cooks to "use frozen mushroom croquette mix" sent in from the commissary; the mix is simply sliced, breaded, deep-fried, and then served with a fancy swoosh of truffle aioli. (Said truffle aioli also comes from the commissary, and is made with Hellman's mayonnaise.)

City Paper's story follows a string of recent bad headlines for Fig & Olive: Back in September the DC location was linked to dozens of cases of salmonella poisoning, and shortly after another salmonella outbreak was traced back to its West Hollywood restaurant. Two similar foodborne illness outbreaks from the same restaurant chain occurring at locations on opposite coasts may have seemed like just an unlucky coincidence to some, but it presumably also raised some flags that encouraged the alt-weekly to start digging into Fig & Olive's food production methods.

Unsurprisingly, the story has spurred plenty of social media backlash against Fig & Olive:

@wcp Fig & Olive Garden.

— Woody (@FlyDTW) December 15, 2015

Fig & Olive is a Disney villain. https://t.co/H6jbK8mPH8

— Annie Lowrey (@AnnieLowrey) December 15, 2015

Pre-cooked frozen risotto shipped in from out of town: - a few bucks at Trader Joe's - $26 at Fig & Olive https://t.co/CcU168rSmL

— Zach Rausnitz (@rausnitz) December 15, 2015

It's stories like that Fig & Olive FOIA that make me doubt all restaurants. Other than laziness on my own part, why eat out?

— Meg Kuhagen (@megluku) December 15, 2015

But is such outrage justified? It's generally accepted that restaurants operate on razor-thin margins, and with the rising cost of labor it's not exactly a surprise that some companies are finding ways to cut corners. Certainly most restaurants rely on at least some pre-prepared ingredients, and it goes without saying that big national chains like Chili's and Olive Garden serve a plethora of pre-made food items.

But when menus spout verbiage about "seasonality" and sourcing from local farms and offer $33 paella del mar, it's understandable that customers — however misinformed — expect their food to be scratch-made. Nonetheless, it appears plenty of diners were successfully duped: Nearly 10 percent of the 1,600-plus Yelp reviews for Fig & Olive's West Hollywood location mention the word "fresh."

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