Olive Garden Italian Restaurant | Family Style Dining | Italian Food (2024)

FAQs

What is the best thing to order in an Italian restaurant? ›

Risotto. Many people don't prepare risotto at home due to its time-consuming nature, which is the perfect reason to order it when dining at an Italian establishment. Rice, cheese, and broth combine to create the perfect base for any risotto meal.

On his interactions with the "chef": "The only time we saw the "chef" was when she made a bolognese sauce while taking pictures with each of us to send to our local newspapers." On how much Olive Garden paid for, and what they got in return: "Basically, yes, they send people to Italy every year.

Reality: Though there are some anecdotal evidence of its ancestry being of Italian origin, the reality is that the fettuccine Alfredo that Americans of all ages have grown up with is actually a New York City creation.

Your Crash Course on the Traditional Italian Menu

Italians are famous for taking their enjoyment of food and drink very seriously, and meals in Italy typically follow a four-course structure and after-dinner drinks. This structure includes antipasti, primi, secondi, dolci, and traditional post-meal drinks.

Pizza. Besides pasta, pizza is perhaps the most popular and recognized Italian food. Pizza is considered a national symbol representing Italy to the rest of the world, so much so that UNESCO has acknowledged pizza as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Hourly pay at Olive Garden Restaurants ranges from an average of $7.43 to $16.85 an hour. Olive Garden Restaurants employees with the job title Line Cook make the most with an average hourly rate of $14.60, while employees with the title Waiter/Waitress make the least with an average hourly rate of $7.17.

Olive Garden doesn't have much of a dress code, other than to be covered - no shoes, no shirt, no service basically. No one cares if you wear your baseball cap in an Olive Garden it is fast casual sit down dining. It is not a place where it matters much.

Take the popular meat sauce, for instance, which contains beef and Italian sausage. It's safe to assume that the Italian sausage does consist of pork, as most traditional preparations do, but there's no official information available from Olive Garden.

The pasta is pre-cooked.

A former Olive Garden employee opened up about some of the chain's kitchen practices in a Quora Q&A forum and revealed that the pasta is never cooked fresh. In fact, the chefs boil huge portions of pasta to an al dente finish every morning, then toss it into ice water baths.

What are the four food rules in Italy? ›

A typical Italian lunch consists of a primo (pasta, soup or risotto dish), a secondo (meat or fish-based dish) and a contorno (side dish). Italians love their carbs and enjoy adding freshly grated Parmesan cheese to their dishes. Italians also exhibit a truly incredible talent for reinventing leftovers.