Olive Garden Gluten Free Options

Last night, we went to the Olive Garden and tried out their relatively new gluten-free options.  Kacie was excited to try out their penne pasta, as any pasta out of the house is a rare treat.  She ordered the Pennine Regate with Marinara, and was very happy with it.  The texture was good and it was cooked properly.  The typical Olive Garden marinara sauce was good, although she is not normally a fan of a chunky tomato sauce as they have.  She thought that overall it was a bit bland, but definitely not bad in any way.  She said that next time she would ask to have some grilled chicken tossed on top and mixed in with the sauce, as that would change it up a bit from a fairly typical straight spaghetti dinner.  The best thing of course, is just being able to have a family dinner at a place like Olive Garden now, since there is now something on the menu for everyone in the family. 

Of course, the breadsticks and normal pasta entrees are not a gluten free option, but there is a decent variety of options that are available now at Olive Garden and are on their gluten free menu.  I’ve scanned the gluten-free menu that they provided us and uploaded it to this article so that you can see the different possibilities.  I hope you find that useful before planning your next dining experience, and now you may consider the Olive Garden as a potential spot since they offer another good option of gluten free dining.

The normal Olive Garden salad is an option, however (minus the croutons of course) and is a very good pre-meal salad if you have never tried it.  The other items on the menu are fairly standard non-pasta items that many restaurants offer, but it is great that Olive Garden now puts these on an official Gluten Free Menu so that people can have a choice that is more in line with a regular meal and not necessarily a special order.  We haven’t tried any of these other menu items from Olive Garden, but if you have and would like to provide some feedback to others, then by all means please do so in the comments section directly below this article.

All in all, we are very happy that Olive Garden now offers gluten free options, and teh pasta with marinara sauce makes for a great Italian dining experience for anyone eating gluten free.  The only recommendation to improve it may be to make it more of a chicken parmesan type of dinner by tossing in some of the grilled chicken and topping with cheese.  That is not on the menu, but the restaurant will be more than happy to prepare it this way for you.

I would say that we give Olive Garden 3.5 stars out of 5, in that it does provide a small variety for a nice family dining night out.  The fact that they now offer gluten free penne pasta is a great step in the right direction that more and more restaurants should be taking, so I applaud them for doing so and being a leader in that regard.  It would be great f they could put more time and thought into the actual gluten free menu (if you can make gluten free chicken parm, then they should list it on the gluten free menu).  But all in all, good food, solid effort by the Olive Garden chain to step up in the gluten free pasta area, and always a good dining experience for the family.