October 17 is National Pasta Day, and October is National Pasta Month. Perhaps that’s why Olive Garden decided to bring back its Never Ending Pasta Bowl!
To help launch its new TikTok account, Olive Garden finally has brought back the wildly popular menu item for the first time since 2019. From Monday, October 3 through Sunday, November 20, Garden-ers can order unlimited servings of four different pastas — fettuccine, spaghetti, rigatoni, and angel hair — along with soup and salad and fresh-baked breadsticks for $13.99.
Each pasta can also be topped with any of five different sauces: Alfredo, creamy mushroom, five-cheese marinara, traditional marinara, or traditional meat sauce. And on top of that, guests can also select either a crispy chicken fritta, Italian sausage, or meatballs as their never-ending toppings.
“After a couple years of our guests asking for its return, we are delighted to bring back our fan-favorite Never Ending Pasta Bowl offer,” Jaime Bunker, Olive Garden’s Senior Vice President of Marketing, said in a statement. “The offer, now in its 25th year at Olive Garden, is one of the most popular in our company’s history, because it reflects exactly what our loyal guests expect when they dine with us: never-ending, abundant, craveable Italian food at an everyday value. We’re thrilled to celebrate this moment with them, and with pasta lovers everywhere.”
The official return of the Never Ending Pasta Bowl is a bit of a surprise, both because it’s been so long since Olive Garden customers have had the chance to say those words out loud, and because Rick Cardenas, the president and CEO of Olive Garden’s parent company Darden Restaurants, previously hinted that the Bowl may only exist in our most carb-heavy memories.
Speaking during an earnings call last December, Cardenas said that the chain had decided to “reduce […] the dependency” on the Never Ending Pasta Bowl because, well, it was attracting plenty of customers without it. “As we look forward, we don’t know if we’ll bring and when we’ll bring Never Ending Pasta Bowl back because we have a never-ending abundance every day with our never-ending first course,” he said.
Only Olive Garden insiders know what prompted the chain’s execs to change their minds, but there are plenty of people who will be super excited that they did — including whoever’s in charge of that @olivegarden TikTok account. There are only so many hints you can drop in a single week.
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