Why Olive Garden's Carbonara Sauce Is More Of An Alfredo

Olive Garden provides thoroughly satisfying fare, always introducing new menu items, like its recently released Spicy Three Meat Sauce, and even letting guests order old ones that are no longer officially offered, like its secret-menu three-ingredient Italian sodas. What's clear, though, is that no one (except the restaurant chain itself, perhaps) even pretends any longer that it's serving up authentic Italian food. And perhaps one of the most telling misinterpretations of traditional Italian cuisine is its carbonara sauce, found on its chicken and shrimp, shrimp, and ravioli carbonara dishes. You see, real carbonara sauce is made from pecorino romano cheese, egg, pasta water (and oftentimes guanciale fat); Olive Garden's version for these dishes doesn't contain any egg at all.

Instead, according to a Reddit thread on r/OliveGarden, it's composed of "cold alfredo sauce base and bacon crumbles mixed together," according to one commenter, while another added that at their restaurant, they also put grated parmesan cheese into the mix. The standalone alfredo sauce, which is incredibly dairy-heavy, has no trace of the carbonara-authentic eggs in it (though it appears it once did, but the recipe has since apparently been changed). And the fact that the chain calls a cream-based sauce carbonara is akin to what one food writer called a "culinary war crime" (via TripOut).

There are also a few other stand-outs for inauthenticity and inaccurately named dishes as far as Olive Garden's menu items are concerned (though, again, hardly anyone visits this restaurant chain for a real taste of Italy; we're just passing along information). First up is its wildly popular Zuppa Toscana, which is unlike any traditional Tuscan soups. In this soup, most of the ingredients are all wrong, especially its two meats (sausage and bacon), and it's missing quite a few vegetables and legumes.

There's also the aforementioned alfredo sauce. This pasta accompaniment, which was supposedly created in the early 20th century by a Roman named Alfredo di Lelio, actually should contain almost half a dozen egg yolks and not a dairy product in sight, including cream, milk, or butter. However, these three all feature heavily in Olive Garden's alfredo sauce.

Finally, though Olive Garden no longer carries it on its menu, it did once offer its guests a pasta primavera dish, which actually has no roots in Italy at all. Instead, it was a 1970s New York City creation for the famous restaurant Le Cirque — which is French-themed. But somehow, by the following decade, Italian restaurants started serving it, and Olive Garden simply followed the crowd.