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“The chicken Alfredo ($10.95) was warm and comforting on a cold day,” she wrote from North Dakota. And suddenly the national media made her a celebrity.
Sept. 18, 2025Updated 4:01 p.m. ET
Marilyn Hagerty, a food columnist who startled the online world with an earnestly detail-oriented and nonjudgmental appraisal of a North Dakota Olive Garden, and who was startled in turn when the review racked up more than one million page views, bringing her national media attention and a book contract, died on Sept. 16 in Grand Forks, N.D. She was 99.
Her death, in a hospital, was from complications of a stroke, said her son, the journalist James R. Hagerty.
Ms. Hagerty had been writing The Eatbeat, her restaurant column in The Grand Forks Herald, for 26 years when, in early 2012, she filed her report about the opening of the city’s first Olive Garden outlet, part of a local branch of a national Italian restaurant chain where the warm breadsticks never ran out.
The Olive Garden’s menu was enormously popular but also routinely mocked for taking starchy, cheesy liberties with the cuisine. Ms. Hagerty did not engage with that debate. Her descriptions of the restaurant and its food were direct and matter of fact.
“The chicken Alfredo ($10.95) was warm and comforting on a cold day,” she wrote. “The portion was generous. My server was ready with Parmesan cheese.”
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When the article first began to ricochet across social media, the initial consensus was that the writer was a kindly Midwestern grandmother who had lost the script. This seemed to be the view of an out-of-town reader who sent her a one-word email: “Pathetic.”
In fact, Ms. Hagerty was following a script of her own. It was her long-running custom to provide factual rundowns of the dining options in Grand Forks, a college town near the Minnesota border that has fewer than 60,000 people and few restaurants intent on culinary innovation.
She covered truck stops, diners and fast-food joints, some of them more than once. Although she wrote about places serving Vietnamese and Somali cuisine in Grand Forks, Eatbeat readers craving a new thrill generally had to look for it in Fargo, about 80 miles to the south.
“If you were going to review the fine dining here, you’d be done in three weeks,” Ms. Hagerty once said of her community.
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Reaction to the review shifted as it became clear that Ms. Hagerty didn’t give a flying breadstick what the cynics thought. Within days, she was in New York, being welcomed by the national media. She gave interviews to “CBS Sunday Morning,” NBC’s “Today” morning program and Anderson Cooper’s syndicated talk show.
She critiqued street-cart hot dogs for The New York Times. (“Could be a little hotter,” was her verdict.) She had dinner at the exclusive restaurant Le Bernardin, a coveted reservation secured for her by the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, a close friend of the owners. (“An unforgettable experience,” she wrote in her hometown paper.)
Mr. Bourdain’s imprint with Ecco later published a collection of her restaurant columns, “Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 128 Reviews” (2013).
“She misses nothing,” he wrote in the foreword. “I would not want to play poker with her for money.”
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Marilyn Gail Hansen was born on May 30, 1926, in Pierre, S.D., to Thyra (Linnet) and Mads Hansen, a shipping clerk at a grocery wholesaler. She wrote for her high school newspaper and then for the paper at the University of South Dakota, from which she graduated in 1948 with a journalism degree.
After a summer reporting job at The Capital Journal in Pierre, S.D., she had been hired by The Aberdeen American News, a paper in the northern end of the state. Two male reporters were brought on at the same time. One man was given the police beat and the other was assigned to regional news and agriculture. She was made the assistant to the society editor.
“I just sat there seething,” Ms. Hagerty later recalled. She took it up with the editor, saying, “I didn’t go to college for four years to be an assistant.”
In 1949, she married Jack Hagerty, a correspondent for the United Press wire service. She and her husband moved several times, always because he had found a job in another city. Finally, when The Herald hired him as an editor, the couple arrived in Grand Forks.
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She put journalism aside at times as their family grew, but she never entirely gave it up. In 1959, she began contributing “News of Women” items to The Herald and gradually expanded her portfolio over the next six decades, writing about food, health, travel, goings-on around Grand Forks and local characters, including a “cheerful person of the week.”
”I just write about sort of half-crazy things,” she told The Times in 2020, when she was filing three stories a week instead of the five she had contributed for many years. “Kind of like what you’d tell your friends but you wouldn’t put in the paper, but I do put it in the paper.”
In addition to “Grand Forks,” two other compilations of her writing were published, “Echoes: A Selection of Stories and Columns by Marilyn Hagerty” and “The Best of The Eatbeat With Marilyn Hagerty.” She continued to write for The Herald until last year, although she had retired, nominally, in 1991.
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In 2012, Ms. Hagerty received the Al Neuharth Award for Excellence in the Media. As an editor at her college paper, she had given Mr. Neuharth, the founder of USA Today, his first job in journalism.
In addition to her son, she is survived by a daughter, Gail Hagerty; and eight grandchildren. James Hagerty wrote about his mother’s late-career stardom in an article that appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal in 2012, when he was a reporter there.
“My mom has her own style of reviewing restaurants: She doesn’t like to say anything bad about the food,” he wrote. “If she writes more about the décor than the food, you might want to eat somewhere else.”
In a “Today” interview, Ms. Hagerty took issue with him.
“My son is full of prunes,” she said.
Pete Wells was the restaurant critic for The Times from 2012 until 2024. He was previously the editor of the Food section.
