Olive Garden's Pasta Noodles Are Rumored To Come From A Brand That's Probably In Your Pantry

The menu at Olive Garden is by no means small, but it's fair to say it's pasta-heavy. It makes sense, seeing as it is an Italian-themed restaurant. But when your speciality is pasta, you need to make sure it's good, and it's highly unlikely that Olive Garden makes its pasta fresh. Instead, the chain is rumored to work with dried pasta, and online speculation points towards a common brand that you probably have at home: Barilla.

Reddit users have claimed that Olive Garden gets its pasta from Barilla, which would allow customers to easily recreate popular Olive Garden pasta dishes at home. In a comment, one Reddit user said, "Olive Garden doesn't even make their own pasta. They use Barilla pasta." In a separate Reddit thread, three different employees claimed that the restaurant's rigatoni comes from the brand, while in another thread, an employee said that the angel hair, also called vermicelli, does too.

On the other hand, that same employee claimed that Olive Garden's other types of pasta actually come from a different brand: Zerega, a massive American supplier. "Our spaghetti is from Zerega and so are a few others like our fettuccine, ziti, shells, tubetti, ect. Our rigatoni and our angel hair (vermicelli) is from Barilla." Darden Restaurants, the company that owns Olive Garden, has never confirmed this, but people sure seem convinced.

Rumors also suggest that Olive Garden par-cooks its pasta in advance, then chills and reheats it to order. "I worked for Olive Garden for more than a decade as a server and bartender, so I was often at the restaurant early and saw the cooks and the food prep of the early morning ... Pastas are cooked until they are close to al dente. They are then cooled in an ice bath and portioned into bags if they are a specialty pasta or put into chilled holding drawers for the cooks on the line to have easy access," wrote someone in a response on Quora.

Apparently, the cooks flash-boil the chilled pasta to finish it and then plate it with sauce as orders come in. Again, Darden Restaurants has never confirmed this, and it should be noted that this doesn't mean the food isn't fresh — it's a time-saving method that's common in a lot of restaurants. However, a lot of stuff is made from scratch in-house at Olive Garden, as Tasting Table learned when Olive Garden gave us the inside scoop on the making of its classic sauces. Plus, if the chain is using Barilla pasta, you're in luck, because it's one of the best boxed noodle brands out there.  

Barilla is an Italian family-owned company that's been around since 1877. It produces the pasta with the same machines and recipes it uses in Italy, sourcing the highest quality wheat available. You can taste that in the final product — and if it's being served with some Olive Garden breadsticks, all the better.