6 Popular Olive Garden Pastas, Taste Tested And Ranked

Nothing screams comfort food (in a faux Italian accent) quite like Olive Garden. The kingdom of carbs and from-scratch soups and sauces is the nation's go-to spot when a tough day calls for a cozy meal on the cheap. Sure, the chain might be the butt of a few jokes due to its inauthenticity — but when the craving for creamy, gooey, cheesy pasta hits, authenticity has no meaning.

Even though we like to poke fun at its reputation for being a chain restaurant loosely disguised as an elevated dining experience, America's love affair with Olive Garden remains in full swing. The chain is home to over 900 U.S. locations, with Texas coming out on top as the state with the most Olive Gardens. It regularly rolls out new specials to rival the acclaimed soup, salad, and unlimited breadsticks — the holy trinity, if you will — letting us know that the OG always has its finger on the pulse of the nation's Italian-American cravings.

I stopped into my local Olive Garden and ordered six of the most popular pasta dinners to figure out which one reigns supreme. I tried meals with creamy Alfredo, tangy tomato, and cheese galore — all of them ready to fight on the card-loaded battlefield, under an ethereal rain of grated parmesan. So join me at the pasta purveyor's palace for this cheesy, noodley showdown, where I'll declare, once and for all, which Olive Garden favorite twirls above the rest.

I grew up in New York as a third-generation Italian-American, so naturally, lasagna is one of my ultimate nostalgic comfort foods. That being said, I wanted to love Olive Garden's rendition of this Italian-American icon, but it couldn't hold a candle to the versions I enjoyed growing up. And, frankly, it couldn't even stand up to the lasagnas from the freezer section of the grocery store.

Let's talk about presentation. This lasagna was clearly plated too quickly, turning into a pile of hot, slippery goop on the plate. Lasagna should look like an elegant slice of square cake made of meat, sauce, and pasta — not an avalanche of soggy, vaguely Italian ingredients. There wasn't enough ground meat to hold the dish together. Chunks of sausage could have made it more stable, because the ground beef was just as wet as the lasagna's other ingredients.

The sauce was the most egregious part of this dish. It tasted like it was all tomato paste, with maybe a hint of garlic and herbs. It was so tart and sweet that it overpowered every other flavor in the dish, including the taste of the mushy noodles and bland cheese. Speaking of cheese, the dastardly layer melted on top of this tomatoey noodle pile cooled quickly, and then took on the flavor and texture of soft plastic. The ricotta stuffed in between the flat noodles was watery and tasteless, acting as the nefarious cherry on top of this sloppy, wet meal.

I love a good carbonara, but I'll probably be forgoing Olive Garden's ravioli-based version on my next visit. And no, it's not because I'm a carbonara purist. I expected Olive Garden's iteration to include cream, even though traditional carbonara never includes milk or cream. But the use of cream and its likeness to Alfredo sauce wasn't what made it fall mostly flat in my eyes. The sauce was overly oily to the point where it felt like the ravioli was swimming in a sea of melted butter instead of a sauce. The use of ravioli in a carbonara in the first place seems odd, since the idea behind this dish is that the thick sauce clings to pasta strands, which is why it's traditionally made with spaghetti noodles.

But my biggest grievance with this dish didn't rest in the overly buttery sauce. The chunks of bacon in Olive Garden's ravioli carbonara were extremely salty, to the point where they tasted fishy. Bacon should always have a burst of umami, but this was too much. It wasn't crispy, but it wasn't particularly soft — it was like a weird pork purgatory of unappealing textures.

Despite its downfalls, the ravioli in this dish was cooked well. They were firm enough not to fall apart in the sauce but not hard and chewy, and their cheesy filling was mild but pleasantly salty and herby.

Ah, the almighty chicken Alfredo. There isn't much to hate about a bowl of rich, cheesy Alfredo sauce topped with grilled strips of juicy chicken. The fettuccini acts as a hearty starch that wraps its tendrils around the sliced chicken to give each bite a balanced mixture of meat and pasta. Chicken is just about the safest protein you can pair with any type of pasta dish, and the version served at Olive Garden was no exception. Even so, the chicken Alfredo experience at the OG was, well, average at best.

The tastiest part of the dish was the strips of grilled chicken nestled atop the glistening heap of white sauce. Although the poultry didn't appear particularly juicy to the untrained eye, as soon as I took a bite, I realized the cooks in the back really knew how to cook chicken to perfection. It was the rest of the plate that suffered a bit. I found the Alfredo sauce to have an odd frothy texture and skewed too heavily on the sodium scale. Yes, it was packed with cheesy flavor, and that was pleasant, but the odd mouthfeel and overly salty bite detracted from the enjoyment. The noodles were also a bit too al dente, so my jaw was put through a workout with each forkful.

A good baked pasta dish covered in cheese is one of those universally loved meals that rarely misses, and Olive Garden's signature baked pasta is a solid example of everything the chain is capable of. The five-cheese ziti al forno is baked with a blend of Italian cheeses and doused in its famous five-cheese marinara sauce. A little birdie gave me the inside scoop on this sauce: Apparently, it's just a simple mix of Olive Garden's marinara and Alfredo. Nevertheless, the sauce combines everything that makes Alfredo irresistible — decadent, creamy sauce and garlic, but with the bright tang and classic acidity of marinara. The cheese and cream mellow out the acidity, so the sauce is expertly balanced and delicious.

A crispy, toasty layer of cheese tops the five-cheese ziti al forno, adding complex textures to the dish. But it fails in the texture department when it comes to the pasta. It was a bit too mushy, so it struggled to hold up to the thick, heavy layer of baked cheese on top. An al dente consistency would have given this dish a little more oomph overall, as well as a more generous sprinkling of herbs. The tang from marinara gave this dish most of its nuance, which might be okay for some sensitive palates, but I was after a little more of a flavor explosion.

I'm a sucker for any pasta dish where shrimp is the star of the show, so Olive Garden's shrimp scampi didn't have to put up much of a fight to pull me in. This dish came with an extremely generous amount of shrimp — in fact, the shrimp-to-pasta ratio completely caught me off guard. I expected a few tiny shellfish to be floating in a sea of angel hair, but it was quite the opposite. A mound of shrimp, which were deliciously crisp and far from chewy, floated on top of a tiny fistful of noodles, but there were plenty of veggies to make up for the slightly less than ideal amount of pasta. The tomatoes were tart and bright and gave the dish plenty of nuance, and the asparagus was loaded with garden-fresh, sweet, and earthy flavor.

My single qualm with Olive Garden's shrimp scampi appeared in the sauce. Scampi sauce is all about lemon and garlic, and I didn't think this take on the Italian-American staple dish was quite garlicky enough. The lemon flavor was plentiful and tart, completing the sweet shrimp and veggies, but a hearty dose of aromatic garlic would have taken this dish up quite a few notches. Nevertheless, it's still worth cranking out a copycat version of Olive Garden's shrimp scampi, since it's surprisingly simple and too good not to enjoy as a regular weeknight meal at home.

Lo and behold, my efforts weren't in vain — a victor emerges, and that victor comes to us in the form of chicken tortelloni Alfredo. No, that wasn't a typo. Tortelloni, as opposed to tortellini, looks like a larger version of the latter stuffed noodle, but it's typically filled with vegetarian ingredients, like spinach and cheese.

Olive Garden's meal featuring these large, ravioli-like noodles comes topped with a heaping mound of tender, juicy chicken — the same tasty meat that acts as the main feature of the chicken Alfredo. There was no shortage of chicken in this dish — there was enough for every single bite. The Alfredo sauce in the chicken tortelloni Alfredo wasn't as thin and weirdly foamy as the sauce featured in the chicken Alfredo. It's likely because the chicken tortelloni Alfredo is baked, which clearly kept the sauce contained and cooked out any excessive water. Breadcrumbs are also mixed with the sauce to give it more texture and make it appear thicker.

The noodles were cooked to perfection and stuffed with herbaceous, cheesy filling that didn't water down the sauce when I cut into them. A heavy-handed sprinkle of fresh herbs complemented the herbs inside the tortelloni, balancing out the decadent, rich sauce with a little bright earthiness. My only issue with this pasta dish was that there wasn't enough left for me to take home leftovers — I couldn't help but devour it all.

To compile this ranking, I chose six of the most popular pasta dishes at Olive Garden using insight from a former server and online reviews. I tried each one hot and fresh in the restaurant, and judged them according to their overall flavor and consistency. The better dishes were balanced and complex with semi-firm noodles and a hearty sauce consistency. I cast aside any personal bias in flavor to rank these pastas fairly and objectively.

I didn't factor in price, portion size, or any nutritional information, since these factors can all vary in significance from person to person. Instead, this ranking was based solely on flavor — the most important aspect of a pasta dinner for the ages.