2 weeks Ago By [email protected] (Chloe James)
Olive Garden may not offer the most authentic culinary experience, but it's Part of its success comes down to the sheer size of its menu. If it's carbohydrates you're after, its iconic unlimited breadsticks and long, ever-evolving list of pasta varieties are tough to beat, with some dishes — such as the Fettuccine Alfredo, Spinach and Artichoke Sip, and Chicken Parmigiana — proving popular enough to stand the test of time. Not all dishes have managed to go the distance.
While Olive Garden has experimented with plenty of new additions since opening in 1982, it's also axed its fair share of menu items in its time. Some of these blipped out of existence without so much of a whimper. However, others sparked full-blown online revolts upon the news of their departure, with some customers still pushing for their return years later.
This peer pressure has worked in the past; in September 2024, amid reports of dwindling sales, Olive Garden revealed that it would bring back two beloved dishes (Steak Gorgonzola Alfredo and Stuffed Chicken Marsala) that it cut during the pandemic. But, of course, we can't sweet talk our way into restoring all of the dishes lost over the years. There are plenty of items that we fear are gone from the chain's menu for good.
From pasta to pie, here are some of Olive Garden's fallen soldiers. Venetian Apricot Chicken Back in 2012, Olive Garden went rogue and branched out from its usual heavy, carb-tastic offerings to introduce a new Lighter Italian Fare section to its menu. All dishes featured in this section contained less than 575 calories apiece, including the likes of fish, pasta, and chicken.
Venetian Apricot Chicken was one of these offerings, combining grilled chicken breast with an apricot sauce and sides of sautéed asparagus, broccoli, and tomatoes. Sadly, Venetian Apricot Chicken was not long for this world. The dish soon disappeared from the Olive Garden menu, leaving plenty of customers pretty bereft in its wake and still mourning its loss over a decade after it first launched.
As was the goal for these Lighter Italian Fare offerings, it was the perfect portion to leave Olive Garden feeling satiated, not sluggish — a tough feat after consuming the bulk of the chain's menu items. Of course, nothing hits quite like the OG dish, but this should tide you over in a Venetian Apricot Chicken-free world. Chicken Giardino Chicken Giardino was another menu item that was billed as a healthier, low-calorie option by Olive Garden.
It originally debuted in 2017 alongside Spiralized Veggie Pasta as an expansion of the chain's Tastes of the Mediterranean menu. It's not clear when or why Olive Garden axed the dish, but it was previously temporarily removed at some point between its launch and 2018 when customers claim that it briefly returned using a new kind of pasta. Nowadays, you won't find Chicken Giardino — or any dish using pappardelle pasta, for that matter — on the chain's menu, but you will find a handful of customers (by which we mean us) haunting the internet by lamenting its absence.
The good news is that there was apparently a time when the exact ingredients for Chicken Giardino were shared online by Olive Garden itself, meaning you won't struggle to find a copycat recipe. Thyme, rosemary, garlic pepper seasoning, chicken broth, lemon juice, and white wine are the key elements behind the dish's sauce, with the entire dish surprisingly easy to pull together. Smoked Mozzarella Fonduta Forget the pasta for a second — we'll be missing Olive Garden's Smoked Mozzarella Fonduta for the rest of our lives.
Dramatic though that may sound, this was truly an appetizer for the ages. Multiple kinds of cheese were baked and melted together into one gooey, decadent dip, served up with slices of toasted bread. Or, as itself put it, it was just "cheese, glorious cheese.
" At some point, Olive Garden had the gall to silently remove Smoked Mozzarella Fonduta from the menu. But fans haven't let it go without a fight. There's a small army of fans out there rooting for Olive Garden to one day restore the appetizer to the menu.
"I still have nasty dreams about the Smoked Mozzarella Fonduta at Olive Garden," admitted one . Another Fonduta-devotee , "I'll never forgive Olive Garden for getting rid of the Smoked Mozzarella Fonduta," while cryptically remarked, "Once [Olive Garden] got rid of the Smoked Mozzarella Fonduta and Stuffed Mushrooms it was over for them." We don't want to get our hopes up too high, so in the meantime.
Spaghetti Pie Everyone loves pie, and everyone loves pasta, which begs the question of why Olive Garden would ever axe a dish as genius as Spaghetti Pie? This masterpiece was first added to the menu in 2016, two years after activist investor argued that "Olive Garden must embrace its Italian roots." reported that upon the dish's launch, Jim Nuetzi — an executive chef for the chain — touted the as a traditional Admittedly, the pies — which were available in two variations, Meatball Deep Dish and Chicken Alfredo — were only ever supposed to be a limited-time offering. Launched in May, they were scheduled to run until July 2016.
Plenty of limited menu items have managed to outlive their official timelines in the past, so forgive us for hoping the Spaghetti Pie would manage something similar. Unfortunately, all varieties have remained absent from Olive Garden since this initial run wrapped up in 2016, but the Spaghetti Pie legacy lives on. Five years later, over 775,000 people tuned in to watch the YouTube channel try to recreate the magic of this "carb juggernaut" and debate its return.
Personally, we'd welcome back the Spaghetti Pie as a menu staple any time. Spicy Calabrian Chicken Sandwich The Spaghetti Pie wasn't the only marvel to hit Olive Garden in 2016. A year after it first introduced the concept of Breadstick Sandwiches — which took the same buttery, garlicky breadsticks offered as an unlimited side at all of its restaurants, baked them slightly shorter and wider, and sliced them in half to make them sandwich-ready — it added the Spicy Calabrian Chicken Sandwich variety to its lineup.
This included Again, we're not entirely sure when this made its exit. All we know is that we now live in the post-Spicy Calabrian Chicken Sandwich world, and we hate it. While we miss all of the Breadstick Sandwiches, this made for a truly tasty lunch, and we've been left looking for the best alternative ever since.
There's no shortage of attempts at copycat recipes out there, with Olive Garden's exact sauce allegedly made from a blend of spicy Calabrian chili paste, pesto, and butter. If you don't feel up to making Olive Garden breadsticks from scratch, we recommend ordering a batch to go. They may not match the exact dimensions of Breadstick Sandwiches, but at least one part of your makeshift Spicy Calabrian Chicken Sandwich will taste authentic.
Shrimp Scampi Fritta Restaurants took a heavy blow during the COVID-19 pandemic, with many businesses trimming down their menus to account for rising food costs and labor shortages. Olive Garden was no exception. The chain not only restricted orders to takeout-only (which ), but axed multiple dishes from its lineup in 2020 amid plummeting sales.
While some of these dishes have since made triumphant returns (such as the aforementioned Steak Gorgonzola Alfredo and Stuffed Chicken Marsala), the Shrimp Scampi Fritta still remains missing in action. What makes this loss all the heavier is the fact that the Shrimp Scampi Fritta was genuinely delicious. It took , with the latter arguably being the key to its success.
In 2021, Olive Garden introduced Shrimp Fritto Misto, which is a perfectly fine appetizer but fails to live up to its predecessor due to its lack of this garlic and white wine goodness. Needless to say, customers remain pretty bitter about the switch. While there are copycat recipes abound online, some have still vowed not to return to Olive Garden until Shrimp Scampi Fritta is restored to its rightful place on the menu, with one , declaring, "Replacing the Shrimp Scampi Fritta with the Shrimp Fritto Misto was the most upsetting change I've ever experienced with this franchise.
" Hear, hear. Ravioli di Portobello Ravioli di Portobello was another victim of Olive Garden's efforts to cut down its menu, having been scrubbed from existence several years ago. As the name suggests, this was It managed to outlast several new additions to the menu before its demise and is — judging by the many people who have questioned its disappearance on Reddit — still extremely beloved post-removal.
There was a time when Olive Garden attempted to replace the dish with the Creamy Mushroom Ravioli, which was essentially the same, but swapped out the smoked cheese and sundried tomato sauce (which was the real standout element of the dish) with an Alfredo sauce. However, this has also been removed from the menu since the demise of the Ravioli di Portobello, with the only ravioli options on the menu currently being the Cheese Ravioli, Ravioli Carbonara, and the Toasted Ravioli. Unsurprisingly, there's still an appetite out there for the Ravioli di Portobello, with multiple copycat recipes popping up to fill the void.
We're not saying they won't be delicious in their own right, but we will say that nothing will ever be quite as satisfying as scooping up the last of your Ravioli di Portobello with an unlimited supply of fresh breadsticks. Tuscan Garlic Chicken In 2013, Olive Garden blessed us with the Tuscan Garlic Chicken — a creamy, meaty dish that formed part of the chain's "2 for $25" promotion lineup. It's been a while since you could find Tuscan Garlic Chicken on the pages of an Olive Garden menu, but the good news is that it's easier to get a fix of something similar than it is for many of the other long-lost dishes on this list.
The chain's entrées currently include Chicken Scampi, which includes sautéed chicken with fresh bell peppers, plus a creamy scampi sauce. Sound familiar? The only real difference between the two is the fact that the Tuscan Garlic Chicken adds red onions to the mix and is served angel hair pasta, not fettuccine. Considering the rest of its parallels to the Tuscan Garlic Chicken, however, we'd say that this is still a worthy substitute.
Braised Beef with Tortelloni To say that Olive Garden customers were upset about the loss of the Braised Beef with Tortelloni would be an understatement. , which makes it all the more confusing why Olive Garden decided to give it the boot in the first place. Customers first started complaining about the dish's disappearance on social media back in 2019.
In the wake of its departure, some fans went so far as to set up a petition to have the Braised Beef with Tortelloni reinstated ASAP. Some claim to have even stopped visiting Olive Garden altogether in the meantime. While these efforts are yet to convince Olive Garden to reverse the decision, they have sparked countless copycat recipes, with a former Olive Garden employee taking to to advise wannabe Braised Beef with Tortelloni chefs to mix a classic Alfredo sauce with a marsala sauce made with , plus to use some form of roast beef if they want to whip up something similar.
Need help with your Alfredo? Here's for an easy, creamy sauce. Giant Italian Classics In case you hadn't already realized, the 2010s were a period of huge innovation — or, depending on how you look at it, creative confusion — for Olive Garden. In 2019, it came up with some of its biggest ideas yet.
Literally. Introduced on April Fools' Day of all days, consisted of the Giant Meatball with Spaghetti, Giant Chicken Parmigiana, Giant Four-Cheese Stuffed Shells, and Giant Stuffed Shells with Shrimp, all of which were fittingly OTT. The responses to these additions were exactly as you'd expect, with the Giant Meatball sparking particular shock.
declared the monstrous new dish (which weighed as much as two baseballs) to be "terrifying," while one user noted, "I heard the cries of countless Italian grandmothers screaming all at once, and were suddenly silenced." Sadly, they haven't reappeared since, but considering (which, let's face it, is kind of inevitable with an 11-inch chicken parm), we're not holding our breath for their return any time soon. Garlic Herb Chicken con Broccoli Olive Garden's Garlic Herb Chicken con Broccoli was proof of that sometimes the simplest dishes are the best dishes.
There was a time when you could find the Garlic Herb Chicken con Broccoli in other forms, such as a pie and an Alfredo version of the menu item. Sadly, these are all a thing of the past now, with fans of the dish left scrambling for a makeshift replacement. The bad news is that you can't find orecchiette pasta in any dish at Olive Garden, meaning said replacements will need to come from your own kitchen.
The good news, however, is that there are plenty of recipes out there aiming to emulate the Garlic Herb Chicken con Broccoli, the majority of which are refreshingly straightforward. Alternatively, if you were willing to accept something a little bit different (but still delicious in its own right), Olive Garden's Chicken Alfredo with added broccoli isn't worlds away from the Garlic Herb Chicken con Broccoli. The key thing is that you'll miss out on the garlic Alfredo sauce, which means it packs slightly less of a punch in the flavor department.
Recommended.
