How much spaghetti can you really eat at Olive Garden in one sitting?
People have made a huge deal out of Olive Garden's reintroduced Never Ending Pasta Bowl, an all-you-can-eat pasta deal that allows you to order an insane quantity of food in one sitting. The sale begins at $13.99 and requires you to first select a type of pasta: fettuccine, spaghetti, angel hair, or rigatoni. Then you get to pick from one of five sauces: Alfredo, marinara, meat sauce, creamy mushroom, or five cheese marinara. If you wish to add a protein (fried chicken strips, meatballs, or Italian sausage), you must pay an additional $4.99 per dish. The deal previously cost $10.99, thus the price has raised by approximately 30% for this reincarnation. Is it still a good deal at the current price?
A tour of the Olive Garden menu
Let me state right away that this pricing is not outrageous. The Create Your Own Pasta option, Olive Garden's brother to the Never Ending Pasta Bowl, is a permanent menu item that typically costs $12.99-$13.99 depending on location. It starts with the same basic offer, which allows you to choose a pasta shape and sauce, as well as add meat for an additional $4-$5. (In addition to the alternatives stated above, the meat options here include shrimp and grilled chicken.) The Create Your Own also includes unlimited soup or salad and breadsticks. But that's it after one enormous bowl of pasta. You've been disconnected. No more pasta for me.
The Never Ending Pasta, on the other hand, begins with soup or salad and breadsticks (also never ending), followed by a large bowl of pasta, and then allows you to order infinite extra helpings of pasta as you go. Insider's reporter recently visited Olive Garden for the promotion and discovered that successive bowls were around half the size of what was initially delivered. Even yet, her appetite didn't allow her to eat much more than the first bowl, and she had to stop eating quite fast. It's worth noting that she started the dinner with a chicken gnocchi soup rather than a salad, which she agreed was probably too heavy a complement to the pasta. But, hey, we all have different appetites, so maybe the soup won't slow you down as much.
Is Olive Garden's limitless spaghetti a good deal?
The Never Ending Pasta Bowl must be viewed in the context of the entire Olive Garden menu. When compared to the restaurant's other dinner selections, this promotion is objectively a terrific deal—both from Olive Garden's and our perspectives.
The base price of the Never Ending Pasta Bowl is $13.99 once more. The Fettuccine Alfredo is the next cheapest item on the menu at $16.99, and most other dinners range between $17.99 (Eggplant Parmigiana) and $22.79 (Chicken Tortellini Alfredo). These are the costs for full-sized entrees in the Chicago area; your mileage may vary. In any case, you're spending a few dollars less for the promise of potentially a lot more spaghetti.
The Never Ending Pasta Bowl is a genuine eater's game, with an emphasis on "possibly." If you can eat two more half-portions of pasta on top of your original bowl—along with the soup or salad you started with and breadsticks—you'll have essentially gotten two Create Your Own Pasta orders down the hatch, which means you'd have consumed roughly $26 worth of Olive Garden food for the price of $13.99. So, if you can go beyond your initial helping of pasta, you've already gotten some extra value from your Never Ending Pasta Bowl purchase in addition to the Create Your Own Pasta choice.
But that's a lot to assume. Consuming two straight helpings of Olive Garden pasta is not for everyone; to do so, you may have to skip the soup/salad and breadsticks, which are the highlight of the meal for some customers. And if you thought you could eat all of this pasta slowly and steadily at home, think again: the Never Ending Pasta Bowl is a dine-in-only deal that is not available for carry-out or delivery, so you must be sitting in the Olive Garden dining room for one uninterrupted marathon pasta session to take advantage of this deal. The order also cannot be split between two or more people, so any amount of pasta you consume as part of the offer is entirely your responsibility.
What if you add some meat? That's an extra $4.99 and an additional 130-480 calories per serving. That implies you're spending more for a dish you're less likely to enjoy many portions of. At that point, you might just as easily choose Create Your Own, which unlocks two more protein selections for your pasta. Furthermore, your choices may cancel out any possible savings: the spaghetti-and-meatballs Never Ending Pasta Bowl costs $17.99, yet the identical item a la carte on the main menu costs $17.98. You'd best hope you have room for an extra serving for the extra penny.
How to Maximize Olive Garden's Never Ending Pasta Bowl
Consider the Never Ending Pasta Bowl, the salad, and not touching any of the breadsticks when they arrive. You can then finish your pasta and greens, ask for the first pasta refill, and have the entire extra half-portion packaged as leftovers—plus you get to keep all of the remaining breadsticks. This strategy allows you to take the most items home for the lowest possible price.
Or you could simply order what you want, eat as much of it as you want, and walk away—from an economic standpoint, it's all the same. In either case, you're taking advantage of a promotion that saves you a few dollars on your overall meal. For its part, Olive Garden understands that the lower price tag is just as appealing as the promise of unlimited entrees, and executives are also aware that it's nearly a statistical impossibility that enough diners will be able to consume enough pasta to make the promotion unprofitable (especially now that the price of the deal has been raised by $3 across the board). We've had our fill of delicious Italian cooking, and Olive Garden has us all in. It's as close to a win-win situation as restaurant dining gets.
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SOURCE: thetakeout
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