The casual Italian chain restaurant brought back its ultimate food challenge. We had to give it a go.
Olive Garden has long held a special place in my heart.
When I was in high school, the closest OG was a 45-minute drive away, so it was a destination reserved for only the most special of special occasions. For teens like me, that meant dinner before prom or homecoming with your date—but only the most deeply committed couples dared make such a lengthy trek. (What if you got into an argument and broke up during the long drive there and back?!)
I never found my Olive Garden date in high school, and it wasn’t until I met my now-husband after college that I ever ate at the casual Italian chain restaurant. So when I told my friends that we’d dined there, they realized just how serious we’d gotten.
With the news that Olive Garden has brought back its popular Never Ending Pasta Bowl promotion, I figured it was the perfect opportunity for a date night out with my husband. After all, nothing says love quite like stuffing your face with as many carbs as humanly possible.
What is the Olive Garden Never Ending Pasta Bowl?
Before we get into how our date night went, here’s how the Olive Garden Never Ending Pasta Bowl offering actually works. For a mere $13.99–a price that the company is proud to point out hasn’t changed since 2022–you can enjoy a first course of soup or salad plus those irresistible breadsticks followed by as many bowls of pasta as you can handle.
Included in the deal are your choice of four pastas and six sauces that you can mix and match to your heart’s content. Available pastas include fettuccine, angel hair, spaghetti and rigatoni, while the sauce options include traditional marinara, Alfredo, five-cheese marinara, creamy mushroom, meat sauce and a new spicy three-meat sauce. For an additional $4.99, you can also top your pasta off with one of three protein options: crispy chicken fritta, meatballs or Italian sausage.
This Is How Much of the Olive Garden Never Ending Pasta Bowl I Could Actually Eat
The chain calls on would-be diners to make a “game plan” for the Never Ending Pasta Bowl, which is something I failed to do ahead of time. This was my first mistake.
I love pasta. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, and would always prefer to be left alone with a big bowl of comforting pasta than a piece of cake. I also have a decently sized, Midwest-born appetite, so this special seems made for me—I figured I’d get through at least a couple of servings of pasta.
I started with the spicy three-meat sauce over rigatoni. This was my second mistake. The red pepper-forward sauce was, indeed, quite spicy, and the addition of the various meats resulted in a pretty heavy dish. The portion was also much larger than I expected, but I thought I could handle it just fine.
About halfway through the bowl, I found myself growing a bit weary of the dish. My husband had ordered the spaghetti topped with five-cheese marinara and Italian sausage, so we traded bowls just to get a few bites of something different. The five-cheese marinara had a nostalgic, sweet, creamy flavor that contrasted well with the spice and snap of the sausage, and I wished I’d ordered that instead.
We traded our bowls back and I continued eating. I began to feel warm, bloated and incredibly uncomfortable. My husband was feeling the same. We paused and chatted about our days for a few minutes in an attempt to rally and open up enough stomach space to continue our journey, but, alas, we had to tap out before finishing even one full bowl of pasta.
How to Get the Most Out of the Olive Garden Never Ending Pasta Bowl
After our leftovers were boxed up, we paid for our meal and headed for the parking lot. I felt an overwhelming sense of disappointment. Rather than enjoying a nice evening out with my husband, I felt like I had flunked a test. In retrospect, I now understand how my non-existent Olive Garden Never Ending Pasta Bowl game plan had failed.
First, let’s talk about the chain’s salad and breadsticks. I adore Olive Garden’s signature salad, which strikes the perfect balance of sweet and tangy thanks to its house dressing. If you’re trying to get the most bang for your Never Ending Pasta Bowl buck, though, the salad and especially the breadsticks are not your friend. While a bit of salad is harmless, I’d suggest holding off on the breadsticks until you’re enjoying them with your leftovers back at home the next day. Otherwise, you’ll risk filling up before your pasta has even hit the table.
Then there’s the matter of your first-bowl order. After some sleuthing on r/OliveGarden—a place where fans and employees of the brand share insider intel—I learned that the first Never Ending Pasta Bowl is larger than its refills. Therefore, if you’re aiming to sample multiple combinations of pasta and sauce, it’s best to either start with a lighter option—like angel hair pasta with classic marinara—or to ask your server if you can have your first serving in the smaller bowl.
Third, there doesn’t seem to be any rule that you must finish one Never Ending Pasta Bowl before ordering another. If I could do my dinner over, I’d have ordered a second bowl of pasta at the point where I stopped eating the first bowl. Then I would have just gotten most of it boxed up to take home. As far as I can tell, the chain’s only rule seems to be that the pasta bowl doesn’t end until you request a box.
Finally, the best way to experience the Never Ending Pasta Bowl at Olive Garden—beyond going with the Olive Garden date in your life—is to be kind to your server and to tip them well. Promotions like this surely bring in a surge of customers looking solely to eat as much as possible for as little as possible without considering the fellow human being running around the restaurant, making it all happen. Don’t be one of those people.
But seriously, just save those breadsticks for your leftovers.
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