Olive Garden Offers to Pick Up the Babysitting Tab for Date Night

A common lament among parents is the expense of going out after having children. Beyond shelling out the cost for dinner, there's usually also a hefty price of paying someone to tuck your kids into bed and then sit on the couch, watching The Bachelor until you come home.

So Olive Garden, known for its widely loved breadsticks and somewhat-Italian food, has come up with an ingenious campaign to get parents into their restaurant: The chain is covering your babysitting tab.

For its "Parents' Night Out" promotion, Olive Garden teamed up with MyGym—a chain that offers kids tumbling classes and birthday parties—to provide free babysitting on Feb. 7. Parents just need to reserve a spot at their local MyGym, if there's one nearby.

Of course such an idea is simple in theory but logistically quite complicated. Olive Garden fans have filed a litany of complaints about age restrictions, mandatory (though refundable) deposits, lack of convenient MyGym locations and other details. But Olive Garden has been responding to the questions with admirable diligence, and given the national exposure generated by the promotion, it's clearly a worthwhile effort.