Try This Easy Olive Garden Ordering Trick If You Crave Better Texture In Your Pasta

You deserve to have the dinner you want, and at Olive Garden, not only are you family, but you are also able to customize your pasta dish more than you might think. In order to optimize your noodle dish for texture, take stock of all your options when placing your order. One of the best Olive Garden ordering tips is that you can, in fact, swap the actual pasta shape in almost any Olive Garden pasta dish you want. 

That's right. Fettuccine Alfredo can become angel hair Alfredo. (And who doesn't love alliteration?) Five cheese ziti? Try five cheese spaghetti. Maybe you love twirling long noodles on your fork and never want a different pasta experience. Maybe you always order the chicken parm with spaghetti, but you're looking to shake things up — not a whole lot, but just the right amount, so you go for bucatini this time. If you don't know where to start, we have a list of the 18 best dishes to order at Olive Garden.

There are several noodle options to choose from, depending on the dish, including spaghetti, fettuccine, bucatini, angel hair, shells, rigatoni, ziti, and gluten-free rotini. Shells, for example, only seem to be a listed option when ordering Alfredo, at least in the online ordering system, and rigatoni isn't an option for some dishes. You may have an easier time getting, say, shells with meat sauce, if you order in person, but you can also write your noodle preference in the "Add Special Instructions" section. Whether your request is honored or not may depend on the location's policies or the specific person preparing your dish.

Among Olive Garden fans, there are many opinions about the best pasta shape, but there's a surprising amount of love for angel hair, even though some people suggest avoiding ordering angel hair pasta at restaurants. For many, the delicate noodle can't be beat. When someone asked pasta lovers to share their favorite shape they order at Olive Garden, one Reddit user wrote, "It's gotta be the angel hair with Alfredo sauce. I had their Alfredo sauce recently, and it was sooo good. And I love how soft angel hair noodles are."

Others can't get enough of the rigatoni. "Rigatoni or angel hair," one customer said. "Rigatoni is easy to eat but angel hair is delicious too. Just ask for extra sauce if you do the angel hair since it sucks up the sauce!" A very good tip. Another pasta-ordering maverick seemed to reference the pasta used in the kids' mac and cheese, saying, "I always get the small shells, like the mac and cheese ones! It's not technically an option on there, but they can sub it." That's some innovation, right there.