The Absolute Best Entree At Olive Garden That Isn't Pasta

For many, Olive Garden awakens thoughts of its legendary soup, salad, and breadsticks or its many pasta dishes. But have you ever tried its non-pasta entrees? If the answer is no, you're missing out. But not every entree it serves is a winner, and we'd hate for you to be put off by a poor first choice if you're venturing into the pasta-adjacent Olive Garden offerings. So, we took the trouble to taste and rank every single non-pasta entree the Olive Garden has and can safely award its Stuffed Chicken Marsala with first place.

We'd even go so far as to say this dish could fool diners into thinking they're eating at a high-end Italian restaurant. Olive Garden's Stuffed Chicken Marsala starts with a well-seasoned chicken breast stuffed with cheese and sun-dried tomatoes, then gets smothered in a delicious mushroom marsala sauce. Overlapping yet complementary flavors of umami, sun-dried tomatoes, and a "richness and complexity" delighted our reviewer's palate. The chicken is served with a heaping mound of mashed potatoes and even more of the mushroom marsala sauce. The whole thing eats like a yummy and coherent dish, made even better by the never-ending soup or salad and breadsticks.

Chicken marsala is a dish more likely to be found in Italian-American kitchens and dinner tables than in actual Italy. For example, if you were traveling through Italy and came across a restaurant with chicken marsala on its menu, that could be an indicator that this restaurant is designed to entice tourists rather than feed the locals. But, the dish certainly has Italian origins, thanks to its namesake wine, marsala. Marsala was named for the Italian port town where it originated and is commonly used as a cooking wine. With Olive Garden being the king of Italian-American chain restaurants, it only seems right that a quintessential Italian-American dish like chicken marsala finds a home on its menu.

The Olive Garden menu has evolved a lot since its first iteration. While pasta has always been a staple, the older menus offered a long list of non-pasta dishes that can no longer be found. Pizzas, sandwiches, flatbreads, and caprese salads used to all grace the Olive Garden menus of yore. The stuffed chicken marsala likely would have held its own against any of these older dishes. It was removed from the menu during the COVID pandemic but made a valiant return in December 2024. Some Reddit users are afraid the dish will only be on the menu temporarily, though, with one saying, "I asked my old manager if it was here to stay, but she believes it's seasonal. Enjoy it while you can!" With how much our reviewer enjoyed this dish, we second that advice.