It's Official: Olive Gardens' Never-Ending Pasta Bowl Is Coming Back
Recurring restaurant promotions are a fundamental part of American culinary life. McRib season (and Shamrock Shake season) at McDonald's, the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte, Outback Steakhouse's free bloomin' onion on National Onion Day — you can literally set your calendar by a lot of these. Now it's official: the grandaddy of them all, Olive Garden's Never-Ending Pasta Bowl, is coming back, so it's time for all of us to cowboy up and see how much carbonara we can put away in one sitting.
Starting on September 25, Never-Ending Pasta Bowl season begins. The company is giving a sneak preview to eClub subscribers from September 18-25, and if you're interested, you can sign up on the restaurant's website before September 16 (via Twitter). Last year, the never-ending pasta bowl cost $13.99, although there are as yet no details on whether inflation will rear its ugly head and the price will go up in 2023.
Olive Garden's endless pasta promotions are the company's signature move
Even if servers hate Olive Garden's endless pasta promotions because of how they mess with their income from tips, customers go absolutely crazy for them. The Never-Ending Pasta Pass ($100 for seven weeks of pasta) was popular enough (with literal pasta scalpers cropping up all over the place online to resell the passes at jacked-up market value), but when the company offered 50 Lifetime Pasta Passes for sale in 2019, they went even more bonkers, selling out in literally under a second. Americans absolutely can't get enough of a good pasta deal.
Of all its deals, though, Olive Garden's Never-Ending Pasta Bowl is the one that started it down the path of providing customers with enough pasta to carbo-load an entire weightlifting team. Since starting the promotion in 1995, back when it cost just $6.95, Never-Ending Pasta Bowl season has been a highlight for American consumers — and it's time for them to get endless plates of spaghetti once again.