The Chocolate Olive Garden Dessert You're Better Off Skipping

Olive Garden can be a polarizing restaurant due to its American spin on classic Italian cuisine. While some die-hard protectors of Italian cuisine wouldn't set foot in the place, many enjoy the budget-friendly experience of dining there, especially indulging in unlimited breadsticks. But as it is with any restaurant, some menu items are big misses, and one of the dishes you should really avoid ordering at Olive Garden is the Chocolate Lasagna.

In our ranking of every Olive Garden dessert, Chocolate Lasagna came second to last. It's not actually a lasagna but a standard chocolate cake with mousse between the layers. It's bland, boring, and uninteresting. It does have an extra layer of crushed wafers that provides some textural variety, but that's its only redeeming quality. The cake is topped with chocolate sauce, which we found to be thick and overly sweet, preferring grated white chocolate on top instead.

Olive Garden diners have strong feelings about this dessert. One person referred to it on Reddit as "genuinely abominable" and "like a stale old Crunch bar left open since Halloween." Given that desserts come to the restaurant frozen and that you'll be shelling out $10 for this sad cake, you're really better off ordering something else.

Decades ago, Olive Garden used to serve a very different Chocolate Lasagna that was a massive hit among the diners, many of whom now dearly miss the dessert. Because it was made with cream cheese, it reportedly didn't have a very long shelf life or a sturdy enough texture, so the restaurant ultimately phased it out.

In late 2018, a new version of the dessert was introduced for a limited time: the Chocolate Brownie Lasagna. It was actually pretty popular with the customers, even inspiring many copycat recipes, but it was only available for a few months. Afterward, Olive Garden rolled out the current version. Initially, some rejoiced at the change, believing it was the old cake making a comeback — but then they had a bite of it and tasted disappointment.

Truthfully, you're much better off ordering the Black Tie Mousse Cake if you're craving a rich chocolatey dessert. It ranked as second best on our taste test of Olive Garden's desserts and was surpassed only by the Warm Italian Doughnuts, the absolute best (and also the most shareable) treat that you can also get with chocolate sauce.