Olive Garden

Here's my new Olive Garden fettuccine Alfredo recipe improved from my first attempt in Top Secret Restaurant Recipes that includes more grated Parmesan cheese and fresh garlic instead of garlic powder. You'll find my improved Alfredo sauce recipe thickens easier and has a better taste. Just be sure not to crank the heat up too high when simmering the sauce or it could break, resulting in a not-so-creamy, curdled Alfredo. 

Also check out my copycat Olive Garden toasted ravioli recipe!

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes by Todd Wilbur.

Menu Description: “Rich layers of chocolate cake, dark chocolate cheesecake and creamy custard mousse.”

There are four delicious layers in this amazing black tie mousse cake that has been a signature dessert at the Olive Garden for years, and assembling your own home clone is not difficult. For the two cheesecake layers in the middle, I created a custom “no-bake” recipe since the chocolate cake on the bottom is already baked, and we don’t want to keep baking it. The top layer is made by slowly cooking egg, cream, and sugar until thick, then stirring in chocolate chips. White chocolate drizzle is swirled into this fudgy topping, dark chocolate buttercream frosting is added, then mini chocolate chips are pressed all around the side of the cake for a beautiful finishing touch. 

My Olive Garden Black Tie Mousse cake recipe takes a bit of time to prepare since each layer needs to set up in the chill box before the next one is added. When it’s all done, you’ll have 12 servings of a really great looking dessert that will bring you loads of thanks from every chocoholic in the room.

Click here for more of my copycat Olive Garden recipes. 

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3 by Todd Wilbur.

Braised Beef Pasta Menu Description: “Slow-simmered meat sauce with tender braised beef and Italian sausage, tossed with ruffled pappardelle pasta and a touch of alfredo sauce—just like Nonna’s recipe.”

It’s a mistake to assume that a recipe posted to a restaurant chain’s website is the real recipe for the food served there. I’ve found this to be the case with many Olive Garden recipes, and this one is no exception. A widely circulated recipe that claims to duplicate the chain’s classic Bolognese actually originated on Olive Garden’s own website, and if you make that recipe you’ll be disappointed when the final product doesn’t even come close to the real deal. I won’t get into all the specifics of the things wrong with that recipe (too much wine, save some of that for drinking!), but at first glance it’s easy to see that a few important ingredients found in traditional Bolognese sauces are conspicuously missing, including milk, basil, lemon, and nutmeg.

I incorporated all those missing ingredients into my Olive Garden Braised Beef Bolognese copycat recipe, tweaked a few other things, and then tested several methods of braising the beef so that it comes out perfectly tender: covered, uncovered, and a combo. The technique I settled on was cooking the sauce covered for 2 hours, then uncovered for 1 additional hour so that the sauce reduces and the beef transforms into a fork-flakeable flavor bomb. Yes, it comes from Olive Garden, but this Bolognese is better than any I’ve had at restaurants that charge twice as much, like Rao’s where the meat is ground, not braised, and they hit you up for $30.  

As a side note, Olive Garden’s menu says the dish comes with ruffled pappardelle pasta, but it’s actually mafaldine, a narrower noodle with curly edges (shown in the top right corner of the photo). Pappardelle, which is the traditional pasta to serve with Bolognese, is a very wide noodle with straight edges, and it’s more familiar than mafaldine, so perhaps that’s why the menu fudges this fact. In the end, it doesn’t really matter which pasta you choose. Just know that a wide noodle works best. Even fettuccine is good here.

For the little bit of Alfredo sauce spooned into the middle of the dish, I went with a premade bottled sauce to save time. You can also make this from scratch if you like (I’ve got a great hack for Olive Garden’s Alfredo Sauce), but it’s such a small amount that premade sauce in either a chilled tub from the deli section or in a bottle off the shelf works great here.

This recipe was our #3 most popular in 2019. Check out the other four most unlocked recipes of the year: Texas Roadhouse Rolls (#1) KFC Extra Crispy Fried Chicken (#2), Pizzeria Uno Chicago Deep Dish Pizza (#4), Bush's Country Style Baked Beans (#5).

Check out this list of our most popular recipes of all-time.

Anyone who loves Olive Garden is probably also a big fan of the bottomless basket of warm, garlicky breadsticks served before each meal at the huge Italian casual chain. My guess is that the breadsticks are proofed, and then sent to each restaurant where they are baked until golden brown, brushed with butter and sprinkled with garlic salt. Getting the bread just right for a great Olive Garden breadstick hack was tricky—I tried several different amounts of yeast in all-purpose flour, but then settled on bread flour to give these breadsticks the same chewy bite as the originals. The two-stage rising process is also a crucial step in this much requested Olive Garden breadstick copycat recipe.

Complete the bottomless experience with my Olive Garden Italian salad dressing recipe.

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3 by Todd Wilbur.

Menu Description: "A traditional topping of roma tomatoes, fresh basil and extra-virgin olive oil. Served with freshly toasted ciabatta bread."

Olive Garden's recently redesigned bruschetta recipe improves on the Italian chain's previous version. The tomato salad includes a little sun-dried tomato and balsamic vinegar, and it is now served in a separate dish rather than on the bread. Now the bread doesn't get soggy. The tomatoes are finely diced before mixing with the other ingredients, and the ciabatta bread is sprinkled with a little grated Parmesan cheese before it's toasted. For my Olive Garden Bruschetta recipe below, try to find a nice, chewy loaf of Italian bread. Get the best bread in the store. The better your bread, the better your bruschetta.

I've hacked a ton of dishes from Olive Garden. Find your favorites here.

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 2 by Todd Wilbur.

Menu Description: “A creamy soup made with roasted chicken, traditional Italian dumplings and spinach.”

It’s hard to find pre-made gnocchi that is as good as the stuff Olive Garden uses in their hit soup. The gnocchi is shaped into small disks and seasoned with a bit of nutmeg. So we'll make our gnocchi from scratch. To make gnocchi that tastes like Olive Garden's, I found it easiest to use instant mashed potatoes. This saved time and the gnocchi tasted great. 

After you make the gnocchi by forming the dough into small disks, you can start on the soup. For the chicken, just grab a roasted chicken in your supermarket. Take off the skin, then remove the meat and chop it up before adding it to the soup. When the soup is done, you will have 8 1-cup servings of a soup that tastes exactly like the new Olive Garden favorite.

Try my Olive Garden Chicken & Gnocchi Soup copycat recipe below and find more of your favorite Olive Garden recipes here.

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3 by Todd Wilbur.

Menu Description: “Sauteed seasoned chicken, shrimp, and spaghetti tossed in a creamy sauce with bacon and roasted red peppers.”

Re-creating this top entrée from Olive Garden allowed me to come up with an easy way to assemble a delicious carbonara from scratch. Traditional carbonara sauce in Italy is usually made with guanciale and sometimes pancetta. But in America and other English-speaking countries carbonara is typically made with bacon, as is this one served at Olive Garden, so that’s what we’ll do for our clone.

Many traditional carbonara recipes also call for egg, but Olive Garden makes the carbonara sauce for this dish in a different, and much simpler, way: they combine bits of bacon with their classic Alfredo sauce which I cloned long ago. In this tweaked version of that sauce, the bacon flavors the sauce while it simmers, resulting in a perfect match.

The red pepper gets roasted in your oven, and the chicken and shrimp are sautéed on the stove top. Put it all together, and you've got four generous servings of Olive Garden Chicken and Shrimp Carbonara with that fabulous sauce, and an impressive dinner for your hungry carbonara cravers.

Try my Olive Garden Chicken and Shrimp Carbonara copycat recipe below, and find more of your favorite Olive Garden copycat recipes here. 

New to the lunch menu in 1995, this sandwich would normally have around 20 grams of fat, mostly because of the Caesar dressing. But if we use some low-fat and fat-free ingredients, we can reduce those fat grams by better than half of the original. And then we'll have a flavor-packed reduced-fat clone of the delicious Olive Garden creation that's great for lunch or dinner.

Keep in mind that for my Olive Garden chicken Caesar sandwich recipe, you'll need to marinate the chicken for several hours. So start this one early, or even better, the day before you plan to eat it. This will ensure that your chicken is well marinated and the flavors in the dressing will have time to develop.

Nutritional Facts
Serving Size–1 sandwich
Total servings–4
Calories per serving–450 (Original–543)
Fat per serving–9g (Original–20.5g)

Find recipes for more of your favorite Olive Garden dishes here.

Source: Top Secret Recipes Lite by Todd Wilbur.

Menu Description: "Grilled chicken breasts topped with fresh tomatoes, mozzarella, basil pesto, and a lemon garlic sauce.”

My Olive Garden grilled chicken margherita recipe starts with a quick 30-minute brine to bless the chicken with flavor and juiciness. While the chicken is marinating and then grilling, you’ll have plenty of time to make the basil pesto and lemon garlic sauce knockoffs.

When the chicken comes off the grill, top it with cheese and pop under the broiler for a nice melt. Once plated, the chicken is doused with the delicious lemon garlic sauce, topped with pesto, and dressed up with colorful grape tomatoes.

And if you’re into it, I’ve also worked up a clone for the side served with this entrée at Olive Garden—Parmesan zucchini. The hack is in the Tidbits below if you’d like to include this simple side with your copycat plate, like they do in the restaurant.

This recipe makes four servings, which is four lunch-size servings at Olive Garden, or two dinner portions. Now, how hungry are you?

Find more of my Olive Garden recipes here.

Menu Description: “Two lightly fried parmesan-breaded chicken breasts are smothered with Olive Garden’s homemade marinara sauce and melted Italian cheeses. We serve our Chicken Parmigiana with a side of spaghetti for dinner.”

Chicken parmigiana is a forever favorite, and it’s not a difficult dish to whip up at home. But for it to taste like the Olive Garden signature entree, we’ll need to take some very specific steps.

Olive Garden’s chicken is salty and moist all the way through, so we must first start by brining the chicken. Give yourself an extra hour for this important marinating step. The marinara sauce used on the chicken is an Olive Garden specialty and no bottled sauce compares, so we’ll make our own from scratch using canned crushed tomatoes and the formula below.

While the sauce cooks, filling your house with its intoxicating aroma, the chicken is breaded and browned. When the marinara is done, top the chicken with the sauce and mozzarella and stick it under your hot broiler until bubbling.

Hopefully, everyone at your house is hungry, because the Olive Garden dinner portion is two chicken fillets, and my Olive Garden Chicken Parmigiana recipe will yield a total of four 2-piece servings. Add a small serving of spaghetti on the side, topped with more of the delicious sauce, and you'll have a perfect match to the restaurant plate.

Can't get enough Olive Garden? Click here for more of your favorite copycat recipes. 

Chicken Parmigiana is delicious, but who needs all the fat that comes from pan frying the chicken breast? Try my Olive Garden's chicken parmigiana sandwich recipe below. The original was the perfect product for a reduced-fat clone, using a special baking technique for the chicken to replace the greasy frying. Even when we use regular provolone cheese in this recipe, our conversion comes out to around half the fat of the original, which has been filling the bellies of Olive Garden customers since 1995. And you won't get splattered with hot oil.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size–1 sandwich
Total servings–4
Calories per serving–553 (Original–631)
Fat per serving–11g (Original–21g)

Find many more Olive Garden copycat recipes here. 

Source: Low-Fat Top Secret Recipes by Todd Wilbur.

Menu Description: “Grilled chicken topped with a lemon garlic butter sauce, sun-dried tomatoes, and capers.”

For many years this traditional chicken dish has been a top choice at the nation’s largest Italian restaurant chain, so an Olive Garden Chicken Piccata recipe is long overdue. Brined chicken breast fillets are grilled and topped with a lemon butter sauce made with garlic, sundried tomatoes, and capers in this copycat clone that will fool even the biggest Olive Garden fans.

Two large chicken breasts get sliced into four fillets here, so you’ll have either four lunch-size portions or two double-sized dinner meals. And if you need even more servings, you can easily double up the recipe.

In the Tidbits, I’ve added a quick recipe for the optional side of Parmesan-crusted zucchini served with the actual dish if you want to make an even more authentic clone.

Craving more dishes from Olive Garden? Check out my copycat recipes here. 

Menu Description: "Chicken breast tenderloins sauteed with bell peppers, roasted garlic and onions in a garlic cream sauce over angel hair."

This chicken scampi dish is a big favorite of Olive Garden regulars. Chicken tenderloins are lightly breaded and sautéed along with colorful bell peppers and chopped red onion. Angel hair pasta is tossed into the pan along with a healthy dose of fresh scampi sauce. 

The sauce is really the star, so you might think about doubling the recipe. If you're cooking for two, you can prepare my Olive Garden Chicken Scampi copycat recipe for the table in one large skillet, saving the remaining ingredients for another meal. If you're making all four servings at once, you need two skillets. If you can't find fresh chicken tenderloins (the tender part of the chicken breast), you can usually find bags of them in the freezer section. 

Find more delicious recipes for Olive Garden's most famous dishes here. 

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 2 by Todd Wilbur.

Menu Description: "Layers of rich chocolate cake and sweet buttercream icing."

The cake mix has cherry flavoring mixed in and the buttercream frosting between the layers is made from scratch, but the real secret to this Top Secret Recipe is how we put it all together. You've got to make two slices through the edge of the baked cake to create the three thin layers, so you'll want to use a long serrated knife. Lay down some wax paper under the cake to help you turn the cake while you slice. Slide the whole thing over near the edge of the counter so that you can more easily keep the knife parallel to the countertop. You can use your favorite chocolate cake mix for the recipe, but be sure not to use one with pudding in it or one that is "extra moist" (Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe is one such brand). These mixes make slicing and layering difficult because the baked cake falls apart so easily.

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 2 by Todd Wilbur.

Menu Description: "Freshly prepared alfredo or marinara sauce, served warm."

The soft breadsticks served at Olive Garden (here's my clone) taste awesome by themselves, but dunk them in one of these warm sauces and...fahgeddaboutit. You can use these clones as dipping sauces or pour them over the pasta of your choice to duplicate a variety of entree items available at the chain. Use the Alfredo sauce over Fettuccine and you get Fettuccine Alfredo. Pour the marinara sauce on Linguine and you've cloned Olive Garden's Linguine alla Marinara. Make up your own dishes adding sausage, chicken or whatever you have on hand for an endless variety of Italian grub.

Find more of your favorite copycat recipes from Olive Garden here.

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3 by Todd Wilbur.

Malibu's great mango-flavored rum is the star in the Mango Martini, along with a little Kern's mango nectar. It goes down fast. Then there's the stronger Pomegranate Margarita Martini. If you like tequila, this is your drink. It's mixed with Patron Silver tequila and Patron's 80-proof Citronge orange liqueur. 

For my Olive Garden martini recipes, you'll also need some real grenadine syrup, the kind made with real pomegranate juice. Stirrings makes a good one. You can also use pure pomegranate juice—like Pom Wonderful—but you'll also have to add some simple syrup since pomegranate juice is tart. Each of these drinks is served straight up in a large martini glass, but you can also add ice to the drinks. And a bendy straw.

Find more cool drink copycat recipes here.

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3 by Todd Wilbur.

This is a classic Italian dish, but with cheese and cream and butter in the traditional version, you can get a whopping seventy grams of fat in a single plateful. For this conversion, well replace those fatty ingredients with substitutes such as evaporated skim milk, fat-free milk, Butter Buds, and greek yogurt. 

Using these substitute ingredients, we can shave something like forty-nine grams of fat off the traditional recipe for fettuccine alfredo presented at the country's largest Italian restaurant chain. This recipe makes two huge dinner-size entrees just like they serve at the restaurant, though you might prefer to divide this into four more modest servings.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size–4 cups
Total servings–2 
Calories per serving–1035 (Original–1236)
Fat per serving–18g (Original–67g)

Source: Low Fat Top Secret Recipes by Todd Wilbur.

Menu Description: “A baked blend of Italian cheeses, pasta, and our signature five-cheese marinara.”

Creating my Olive Garden’s famous baked ziti copycat recipe would not be possible without a perfect clone of the chain’s popular five-cheese marinara sauce. I started with my previous recipe of the plain marinara for Olive Garden’s Chicken Parmigiana and enhanced it with the addition of five kinds of Italian cheese and heavy cream.  

Determining which five types of cheese are in a prepared sauce is tough without some insider assistance, so before cooking I focused my efforts on convincing a server to ask the chef for the list…and I got it! The blend of cheese used here in the sauce comes straight from the kitchen of my local Olive Garden. When you taste it, you’ll know the intel was legit.

After the sauce is added to the pasta it’s topped with a cheese-and-breadcrumb mix called “ziti topping,” then it’s browned under a salamander (for the restaurant version) or a broiler (for your version). The result is a beautiful dish with great sauce and a cheesy topping that should satisfy even the pickiest baked ziti fanatics.

I've cloned a ton of dishes from Olive Garden. See if I hacked your favorite here.

The delicious Frozen Tiramisu—Olive Garden's dessert in a glass—requires espresso syrup that you can make with sugar and espresso or strong coffee. Each serving requires just a little of the syrup, so you'll have plenty for several servings.

Click here to see if I hacked your favorite dishes from Olive Garden.

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 2 by Todd Wilbur.

Garlic mashed potatoes are a great side for many entrées, especially when the mashed potatoes are as creamy and flavorful as those at Olive Garden. In our hack, the cloves of peeled garlic are boiled with the potatoes. When the potatoes get passed through a potato ricer (or mashed) the softened garlic cloves go along for the ride and get mashed up too. This way, you’re guaranteed to get the perfect amount of flavorful garlic in every bite.

I settled on cream as the dairy here in my Olive Garden Mashed Potatoes copycat recipe after my attempts using milk and half-and-half resulted in thin and runny potatoes. I found that cream adds the perfect thickness and smooth richness to the mashers, and it made the closest duplicate to the original potatoes.

This side goes great with our Olive Garden Stuffed Chicken Marsala copycat recipe.

Menu Description: "A creamy hot dip of artichokes, spinach and Parmesan with pasta chips."

Just about every aspect of the Olive Garden restaurants was developed from consumer research conducted in a corporate think tank by the General Mills Corporation. Restaurant-goers were questioned about preferences, such as the type of food to be served, the appearance and atmosphere of the restaurant, even the color of the candleholders on each table. The large tables and the comfy chairs on rollers that you see at the Olive Garden restaurants came out of those vigorous research sessions.

I'm not sure if this dish came from those sessions, but according to servers at the Olive Garden, the Hot Artichoke-Spinach Dip is one of the most requested appetizers on the menu. The restaurant serves the dip with chips made from fried pasta, but you can serve your homemade Olive Garden hot artichoke dip with just about any type of crackers, chips, or toasted Italian bread, like bruschetta.

Try my Olive Garden Hot Artichoke Dip recipe below, and find more of your favorite Olive Garden recipes here.

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes by Todd Wilbur.

I tweaked this world-famous hot artichoke and spinach dip for an appearance on The Dr. Oz Show. Now you can enjoy your favorite appetizer guilt-free. Using reduced-fat cream cheese and Greek yogurt, this recipe cuts the fat and calories of the original dish nearly in half. 

Click here for the original version. 

Original                 Todd's
488 calories          264 calories
 23g fat                  15g fat

In the 1970's, food conglomerate General Mills expanded its growing restaurant business. A research team was organized to study the market, and to conduct interviews with potential customers on what they want in a restaurant. Seven years later, in 1982, the first Olive Garden restaurant opened its doors in Orlando, Florida. Today it is the number one Italian restaurant chain in the country with over 470 stores.

One of the all-time favorites at Olive Garden is the Italian salad dressing served on the bottomless house salad that comes with every meal. The dressing was so popular that the chain sells the dressing by the bottle "to go." You won't need to buy a bottle, though. With my Olive Garden Italian salad dressing copycat recipe, you can make your own version that tastes just like the original, and it's way cheaper.

The secret to thickening this dressing is to use dry pectin, a natural ingredient often used to thicken jams and jellies. Pectin can be found in most stores in the aisle with baking and cooking supplies, or near the canning items.

Complete the experience with bottomless Olive Garden Breadsticks. 

Source: Top Secret Restaurant Recipes by Todd Wilbur.

We love to eat salad because it seems so healthy. But add just a couple tablespoons of salad dressing and you've gone from no fat to lots of fat, before your main course has even hit the table. If the salad dressing is delicious, as is Olive Garden's, you might be pouring on more than just a couple tablespoons. Here's a way to eliminate the fat grams from the dressing, but keep all the flavor.

We'll take out the oil, and add dry pectin to thicken the dressing, along with more water than used in the original version of this recipe. We can add a decent amount of Romano cheese and a single serving of the dressing still comes in under 1/2 gram of fat. Add some vinegar, a little corn syrup and lemon juice, some spices—mission accomplished.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size–2 tablespoons
Total servings–11
Calories per serving–42 (Original–90)
Fat per serving–0g (Original–8g)

Click here for my original version of Olive Garden Salad Dressing. 

Source: Top Secret Recipes Lite by Todd Wilbur.