The Olive Garden Sister Restaurant That's 'The Closest To Actual Scratch Cooking' As You Can Get

The Olive Garden is one of various restaurants under the Darden Company umbrella, which also includes fan favorites like LongHorn Steakhouse, Yard House, and The Capital Grille. But the latest sister restaurant to be acquired by Darden is Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen, a restaurant chain beloved for its scratch-made menu.

And while you might be skeptical of Cheddar's claim that the menu is indeed handmade, there are many former and current employees to back up the claim. In a a 2016 KMTV 3 interview a culinary manager for Cheddar's explained that chain changed its name from Cheddar's Burgers and Such, to Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen Cheddar's to show its "commitment to serving handmade quality food from scratch" and "highlight the fact that 90% of our menu is made in house." To that effect, a former Cheddar's Kitchen manager on Reddit confirmed that "after working for several corporate chain restaurants it was the closest to actual scratch cooking of them [all]."

And we can really taste the homemade touch they put on many of the menu items. For example, we think Cheddar's cornmeal white fish platter is one of the tastiest fried fish dishes of any chain restaurant. We also crowned Cheddar's loaded baked potatoes as some of the best in the biz. While a baked potato is hard to mess up, other scratch-made items like their utterly flakey honey butter croissants are fan favorites that take finesse. You can try your hand at making them at home, with a few shortcuts.

Cheddar's emphasis on scratch-made cooking as one of its main appeals is a good selling point. Nothing tastes as good as a meal made with whole, fresh ingredients. Not only does scratch-made food taste better, but it's also more nutritious. Many pre-made, processed, pre-packaged foods come with a long list of chemical preservatives, coloring, and flavoring agents that are linked to everything from obesity to cancer. So, cooking from scratch gives you basic, simple ingredients that help you control what goes into your body. While it may take more effort, buying whole ingredients to make your own meals is also more cost-effective than buying pre-made or frozen meals, to say nothing of eating out all the time. Of course, eating at Cheddar's every day isn't the cheapest way to eat handmade food either, so check out our list of the foods you should be making from scratch at home.

While the former kitchen manager on Reddit "never saw an item go straight from a freezer to microwave to a plate," they did admit to cutting a few corners by using prepackaged ranch seasoning packets to blend into buttermilk and mayonnaise for the ranch dressing or adding a few packages of instant mashed potatoes to a vat of hand-mashed real potatoes. However, one might consider this to lie within the definition of making food from scratch. We'll give the chain some leeway, considering the standard protocol of frozen and premade foods dominating many chain restaurant kitchens.