Darden Restaurants To Present At The Goldman Sachs Lodging, Gaming, Restaurant & Leisure Conference

May 31, 2002

ORLANDO, Fla., May 31 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ --
Darden Restaurants, Inc. (NYSE: DRI) will be presenting at the Goldman Sachs Lodging, Gaming, Restaurant Leisure Conference to be held in New York on Thursday, June 6 at 9:30 am Eastern Time. A replay-only audio webcast of the presentation will be available over the Internet at https://www.gs.com/ir/conf. Username: conference/conf5; Password: goldman5. The webcast will be available for a period of 2 months (until August 6, 2002).

As the largest casual dining restaurant company in the world, Darden Restaurants, Inc., owns and operates over 1,100 Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Bahama Breeze and Smokey Bones BBQ Sports Bar restaurants with annual sales of $4.02 billion. Darden is headquartered in Orlando, FL.