Olive Garden Dishes You Won't Find In Italy

Here's how Olive Garden describes itself on its website:

Olive Garden is a family of more than 780 local restaurants committed to providing every guest with a genuine Italian dining experience.

While the notion of a "genuine Italian dining experience" is certainly a subjective one, there are countless examples of "Italian" dishes in the United States that may have evolved thanks to a strong Italian-American population presence, but don't actually reflect the cuisine of Italy. The same is true with many other cuisines -- American Chinese food varies pretty significantly from what you may find in China.

The Olive Garden, however, spends a fair amount of marketing capital ensuring that customers think its food is what they may find in Italy. The company even has a culinary institute in Tuscany.

Despite claims of authenticity, the Olive Garden's mission is to serve food that caters to an "average" American palate, not an Italian one. Here are six of the more egregious examples of Olive Garden's "Italian" food that you won't find in Italy:

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• Hot Artichoke-Spinach Dip

  <strong>What Olive Garden Says:</strong> A blend of artichokes, spinach and cream cheese. Served with Tuscan bread. <strong>What We Say</strong>: Artichoke spinach dip is awesome, but it definitely isn't an Italian creation. We get why Olive Garden wants it on the menu -- who <em>doesn't</em> like hot, creamy dips -- but this is more of a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/12/best-worst-spinach-dip-chain-restaurants_n_1663190.html">chain restaurant staple</a> than something you'll find across the pond.

• Chicken & Gnocchi Soup

  <strong>What Olive Garden Says:</strong> A creamy soup made with roasted chicken, traditional Italian dumplings and spinach. <strong>What We Say: </strong> You can definitely find gnocchi in Italy, but it is usually a standalone dish with sauce and definitely isn't something served in soup. Gnocchi is pretty rich on its own, so it hardly needs creamy broth and chicken to accompany it.

• Tour of Italy

  <strong>What Olive Garden Says: </strong>Homemade lasagna, lightly breaded chicken parmigiana and creamy fettuccine alfredo. <strong>What We Say:</strong> You'll get blank stares if you say the word "fettucine alfredo" to Italian, despite the dish's popularity, stateside. Likewise, chicken parmigiana is everywhere in the U.S. but not nearly as ubiquitous abroad. Flickr: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/caseyflorig/4737219624/">Casey Florig</a>

• Moscato Peach Chicken

  <strong>What Olive Garden Says:</strong> Grilled chicken breasts with a moscato wine and peach glaze served with spinach, tomatoes and curly mafalda pasta in a creamy parmesan sauce with a touch of pancetta bacon. <strong>What We Say:</strong> Moscato is an Italian sweet wine, so Olive Garden sort of gets some points there, but there's just way too much going on here to think that this is actually based on an Italian dish.

• Chicken & Shrimp Carbonara

  <strong>What Olive Garden Says:</strong> Chicken and shrimp with bucatini pasta in a parmesan cream sauce with pancetta bacon and roasted red peppers, baked and topped with seasoned breadcrumbs. <strong>What We Say:</strong> Carbonara is typically made with pancetta, egg, cheese and black pepper. While U.S. restaurants will sometimes use a cream sauce in place of raw egg for food safety reasons, we're not sure where the red peppers come from. Italians probably wouldn't put additional proteins in a carbonara.

• Grilled Pork Veneto

  <strong>What Olive Garden Says:</strong> Tender boneless pork ribs topped with a sweet red wine glaze, served with tomato and mozzarella ravioli topped with roasted garlic tomato sauce and alfredo. <strong>What We Say:</strong> We're not sure why the northeast region of Veneto has been tacked onto this dish title. Grilled pork is hardly a standout of that region, nor is all the other dish accoutrements. But hey, sure, let's just throw a random Italian region on a dish name. Why not?

Comments

[Sharyn350z]

10:17 AM on 01/30/2013

Disgusting place. My mother lives for Olive Garden. She takes me there and the only thing ill eat is a side of lettuce and sliced tomatoes. She gets all embarrassed, at least ill live!!! That food is food porn.

[jgrimoldy]

09:43 PM on 01/29/2013

I refer to the Olive Garden as "The Salt Lick" because that's precisely what it is -- everything is bogged down in salt.

[pixeloid]

02:07 AM on 01/23/2013

I can't imagine ANYTHING at the Olive Garden being sold in Italy, or in places where people know what real Italian food is.

[SeanWilliams]

02:21 AM on 01/21/2013

I’ll see if I can explain why it’s funny without sounding like a jerk…. most of the people passing it around grew up in places where Olive Garden was the most mundane, homogenous faux-Italian food you could imagine (and I grew up in Dallas, for crying out loud). So to describe something you can find in any medium-sized city’s strip malls in such grandiose terms (“Tuscan,” “most beautiful”) is pretty humorous. Which doesn’t take away from Marilyn’s awesomeness and capacity for wonder. It’s amusing. And it reminds you of perspectives outside sophisticated big cities.
If you are interested in gardening: http://goo.gl/s3oxb

[cardiaccare]

02:14 PM on 01/15/2013

Faux Italian.

[valeskas]

11:58 AM on 01/15/2013

I lived in Europe for a long time and believe me, the food in Italy is totally different from what we call here, Italian food.

[Lavedula]

09:44 AM on 01/15/2013

Actually, it would be more accurate to say that NOTHING at the Olive Garden bares any resemblance or relation to any regional Italian cuisine. Anyone who says any different has never been to Italy (although, it should be said that years of British and American tourism to Italy has also led to the creation of "touristic menus" designed to appeal to these palettes). Olive Garden is a classic example of Americanized Italian food. Americanized Italian food is very different than Italian American food. Italian American food developed in Italian immigrant/Italian American communities and involved innovating regional dishes with the ingredients available at hand. But, Americanized Italian food of the Olive Garden is not at all related to the Italian American experience. Instead, it the invention of corporate America designed to appeal to the mainstream Anglo-American palette. In this way, it is similar to Taco Bell or to the average Chinese restaurant, etc. Personally, I think it's pretty disgusting, but to each his own. But, to call it authentic is insulting.

[Don Giovanni]

08:46 AM on 01/15/2013

You won't find goosh like this in Italy.

[ebbelwoi]

05:02 AM on 01/15/2013

I've been to Olive Garden twice in my life (stupid relatives). The most amazing thing about this horrible experience was the zit-faced waiter hovering over everyone with a plastic cheese grater and some kind of industrial cheese-food which they offered to put on every single dish.

I imagine my own private version of Hell would probably be perpetual confinement in an Olive Garden.

[honeybear64]

10:12 PM on 01/14/2013

It actually doesn't bother me how "authentic" or "inauthentic" Olive Garden's food is, since we all know that culinary traditions change and evolve when they are introduced into, and become part of, the cuisine of another culture. It happens everywhere, all the time.

No, my problem with Olive Garden is not that it doesn't serve "authentic" Italian food. My problem is that it CLAIMS to do so. A person might actually be really interested in learning about the cuisine of Italy, and the unsuspecting, naive consumer, by dining at Olive Garden after reading its promises, is going to think he or she is getting an authentic Italian "Old Country" experience, when such is not the case.

On a side note, authenticity and quality are two unrelated issues. It bugs me when people conflate the two, and I find it irritatingly patronizing when every example of Americanizing a dish is characterized as "dumbing down" the food. One thing that annoys me about a lot of American "foodie" types is what I can only describe as a sort of widespread inferiority complex - while deeply subversive of their own food culture, they can be respectful to the point of downright conservatism when it comes to anyone else's. If it wasn't "dumb" for the Vietnamese to adapt the French "pot au feu" and come up with "pho", then it's not "dumb" for Americans to eat meatballs WITH spaghetti just because in Italy they're two separate courses.

[BrooklynChef]

04:16 PM on 01/14/2013

Fettucini Alfredo was invented in Rome. Is a common dish, although not commonly called Fettucini alfredo

[valeskas]

11:58 AM on 01/15/2013

What do they call it ?

[Scottie McCrary]

03:26 PM on 01/14/2013

This is news? Really? Who ever thought that the Olive Garden was authentic Italian. It's Americanized Italian food. It's not bad for what it is trying to be. But this is not exactly groundbreaking reporting.

[AWAbooks]

09:41 PM on 01/14/2013

lol! Well done Scottie,

The Cheetoh is yours :-) My jaw was a-dropped thinking the exact same thing....

...and it's downright refreshing to see you don't have to be a Sicilian by way of Philly to realize it ;-)

Who writes & greenlights this scat?!?

[yogajan]

03:17 PM on 01/14/2013

I went to Olive Garden once and will say that their salad and bread sticks were edible. Other than that, everything was gross, not Italian and not Italian-American. They should change its name to Cooked Garbage.

[El Chingaso]

07:10 AM on 01/16/2013

Last time I graced the doors of an OG, it smelled like a public bathroom. We turned around and quickly exited the premises.

But lots of "heavy-framed" Americanos were lined up waiting for their turns at the processed food troughs.

[SBinF]

01:53 PM on 01/14/2013

Only 6 dishes? I contend that there is little, if anything on Olive Garden's menu that is even close to authentic Italian. Heck, calling it all "Italian" isn't even correct. As with American cuisine, the food of Italy will vary dependent on the region.

[gd1010]

01:29 PM on 01/14/2013

There's nothing even remotely "authentic" about Olive Garden's food. It's assembly line, marginal food made by cooks that have no real training in the food they're manufacturing. It's no different than going to Red Lobster for "real, fresh seafood".

[Theresa DeRepentigny]

03:48 PM on 01/14/2013

*gasp* but what about the culinary institute in tuscany????

LOL!
closely watching the joe's crabshack recently built in my quaint new england town...packed at first but just a few months later they almost appear to be closed.

[gd1010]

04:35 PM on 01/14/2013

LOL I love that commercial that implies that the "chefs" are internationally trained.

[merlin57]

07:40 PM on 01/14/2013

Interesting ..... Olive Garden and Red Lobster are owned by the same parent company.

[Sharyn350z]

10:20 AM on 01/30/2013

Too funny. You can picture the "chefs" in the back opening boxes and putting stuff in the microwaves. A la carte-board. Ha ha. Sick .