Does Olive Garden Serve Pizza Outside The US?

Ah, Olive Garden: Americans' favorite Italian casual dining restaurant that, well, isn't actually traditionally Italian (at least according to some Italians themselves). Among the many beloved, often customizable items on the menu — its never-ending pasta bowls, unlimited breadsticks, and well-known bottomless salad among them — pizza is one of those Italian classics that you won't be seeing on the menu. That is, in the U.S. — because in three specific countries, you can dig your teeth into an Olive Garden pizza.

Olive Garden operates in several territories across the world, and in the Philippines, Panama, and Costa Rica, you can find pizza on the menu. The former has a selection of thin-crust pies, including a classic margherita, a four-cheese (modeled on the Italian "quattro formaggi"), an anchovy olive, sausage and cheese, chicken alfredo, truffle and honey mushroom, and bacon and spinach. Over in Panama's Tocumen International Airport, the Olive Garden also has a Meat Lovers pizza (though you can also get a plain cheese or pepperoni), while in Costa Rica, it's part of their weekday "Pronto Bowl" menu. All of these are largely remnants of Olive Garden's former menu, which did, in fact, serve pizza in the US-of-A, yet was ultimately discontinued in the States in the 1990s.

Olive Garden and pizza were, on paper, a perfect marriage that ultimately failed three times. The restaurant chain — opened in 1982, with over 900 establishments and 99,000 employees — tried its hand at pizza early on, with one 1990s menu showing "Pizza Americana." Its subsequent two pizza stints were in the past decade: First, in 2015, with the Breadstick Pepperoni Pizza appetizer designed by Logan Guleff, the winner of MasterChef Junior; and three years later, with the Meatball Pizza Bowl that saw meatballs, sauce, and cheese inside a bowl-shaped pizza. Both experiments were short-lived, only lasting a few months.

The restaurant chain has never openly admitted why it couldn't keep pizza on the menu, which has led to many theories online. Among these is that the cost of the extra labor needed to cook the pies wasn't profitable enough, especially as the centerpiece bestsellers over at Olive Garden tend to be other dishes. Another regarded the negative feedback over the quality — the 2018 Meatball Pizza Bowl wasn't met particularly warmly, as reviewers complained about the flavor and texture. A whole Reddit thread is dedicated to the topic, rife with hypotheses, including that pizza did not fit the upscaled image Olive Garden supposedly tries to project.

Whatever the reason, it seems the pizza was popular enough in the aforementioned three countries to survive on the menu — so if you want to try it out for yourself and come to your own conclusions on what the fuss over Olive Garden's pizza was all about, you'll have to hop on a plane for a few hours.