By Debbie Schlussel
So, you’re a highly successful marketing executive. You’ve managed to make your mid-priced, mediocre, imitation-Italian, chain restaurant food a household name around America. For FAMILIES.
In fact, your establishment’s well known slogan is, “When you’re here, you’re family.”
But then, but then–something bad happens. Somebody sorta well known for doing nothing of note repeatedly endorses your product. Problem is that somebody is known for being a sleazebag and a well-known likely incubator of communicable diseases, for taking her clothes off, for being a bimbo extraordinaire, and for being one of Hugh Hefner’s silicone-valleyed reality TV concubines.
What do you do? Your national restaurant chain’s reputation as a wholesome, family dining experience–the reputation you and other advertising execs worked so hard to build–could be down the drain in an instant. Worse, restaurant fans might become former fans, and they might make some connection with the filth and diseases this woman embodies and translate it to what they’re eating. As in, “When this slut is here, her diseases and behavior are ‘family’, too.”

Hugh Hefner Concubine Kendra Wilkinson:
When Sleaze, Disease, and Silicone Come to Olive Garden, They’re Family
So you have no choice but to desperately ignore this woman and make her go away. Well, actually, you do have a choice: to denounce her. But apparently, Olive Garden simply doesn’t have the cojones to denounce this sleazebagette who shares Hugh Hefner’s cojones, and they won’t even denounce her stupid Playboy pictorial contest for Olive Garden waitresses.
Way to protect that “family” image, Olive Garden:

Kendra Wilkinson, a Playboy cover model, television star and one of Hugh Hefner’s three live-in girlfriends, professes deep love for the Olive Garden Italian restaurant chain.
The feeling isn’t mutual.
To the consternation of Olive Garden’s marketers, who have spent millions crafting the franchise’s family-friendly image, the 23-year-old adult-entertainment star and aspiring real-estate mogul repeatedly uses her spotlight to rave about its midprice eateries. Ms. Wilkinson hoists Olive Garden doggie bags in the air and extols its chicken parmigiana. She once scandalized European diners by declaring the Olive Garden preferable to any restaurants in Italy.
Ms. Wilkinson, whose tan skin and blonde-white hair project classic California, isn’t on the payroll. She is a rogue brand ambassador: a celebrity who is genuinely, publicly devoted to a product or service, even if he or she doesn’t quite embody the values that the brand’s managers may be trying to convey.
Executives at Olive Garden declined to discuss the uninvited spokesmodel. One official says the company has tried to walk a fine line with its response, maintaining the chain’s wholesome image without alienating potential customers. “I don’t feel comfortable talking about this…because it is a complicated issue for the brand.”

Complicated? I think it’s pretty simple. Why can’t they just say this?:

Olive Garden is a family restaurant. We do not endorse the lifestyle embraced by Hugh Hefner and his harem of concubines. Frankly, we at Olive Garden think that it is time for this octegenarian child to grow up. We think the bimbos on his reality show, including the one who likes our food, are poor role models for the female employees and customers of Olive Garden.

But, of course, Olive Garden doesn’t have the guts, because the restaurant might offend that key demographic of Playboy readers (for the articles, of course) and concubine centerfolds of the month. If the restaurant had the guts to publicize the message I wrote above, a lot of families would applaud.
But instead Olive Garden execs are remaining mum, as the peroxided, breast-implanted shenanigans continues:

Earlier this year, buoyed by her starring role on “The Girls Next Door,” a highly rated reality show that follows the lives of Mr. Hefner’s girlfriends, Ms. Wilkinson launched a modeling competition for attractive Olive Garden waitresses. The prize: a nude Playboy pictorial. Ms. Wilkinson took the contestants’ photographs herself.
“Our position is that our team members as private citizens have freedom to participate,” says Olive Garden spokesman Mara Frazier. “While we’re not endorsing the initiative, we’re not making choices for our employees.” Olive Garden is a unit of Orlando, Fla.-based Darden Restaurants Inc., which also owns the Red Lobster seafood chain.

If the restaurant had even the slightest guts, it would instruct employees who participate in this, um, “competition” that they will be terminated.
But, again, Olive Garden simply doesn’t have the guts. It does, though, have a lot of pasta and sauce it wants to pimp on families. . . and apparently the Hefner fan base.
Olive Garden . . . the New Hooters.
***
I’ve written about this ho-bag, Ms. Wilkinson, before. In August 2006, I wrote:

Playboy “model” (euphemism) and Hugh Hefner “girlfriend” (euphemism) Kendra Wilkinson is upset that Eminem spilled a bottle of water on her at a video shoot. We’re definitely NOT fans of Eminem. But, hello? This woman who repeatedly flashes the camera on “The Girls Next Door” reality show is mad that a rap star poured water on her. You’re a glorified whore. Don’t be shocked–shocked!–when a rap star treats you like one.
Live life like a wet t-shirt contestant, get treated like one.

Well, in two years, nothing has changed, except, again, that Olive Garden can’t get up the nerve to give her the verbal bitch-slap she badly deserves.