10 Reasons This Popular Italian Restaurant Is No Longer America's Favorite Casual Dining Chain

What happened to Olive Garden? At some point down the line, it clearly lost its way. The restaurant chain has been around for decades, and made its name offering affordable and accessible versions of Italian classics to the masses (even if every now and again it shot itself in the foot with its, shall we say, brave attempts to create new dishes). This formula worked exceptionally well for Olive Garden, and until recently, its owner Darden was rubbing its hands together at the fact that the restaurant was America's top casual dining chain.

However, in 2025, things took a turn for the worse for the brand. Olive Garden was knocked off the top spot by Texas Roadhouse, which pulled ahead in popularity with a massive increase in sales, to become the biggest casual dining option in the United States. Olive Garden, meanwhile, was seen to have stagnated in its sales in the last few years, giving the steak chain the opportunity to start dominating.

So what happened? Where did Olive Garden start to go wrong, and why has it been struggling to keep its customers in the last few years? In this article, we've got everything you need to know about Olive Garden's fall from grace.

It's fair to say that Olive Garden has been resting on its laurels for a while. The restaurant operates with an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality, which you can see in its unwavering menu. Unfortunately, this lack of innovation (and perhaps investment) has meant that competitors like Texas Roadhouse have been able to surge ahead by combining a rock-solid growth strategy with an understanding of what customers want.

One big reason cited for Texas Roadhouse's overtaking of Olive Garden is the public's increased taste for steak in a post-pandemic world. While Texas Roadhouse is obviously helped here by being a steak chain, it's arguable that Olive Garden could have cottoned onto this too, and pushed or expanded its steak choices. Instead, it allowed Texas Roadhouse to swoop in. What's more, Texas Roadhouse invested significantly in its staffing and operations processes and supercharged its new store growth, which paid off massively. Oh, and it's also managed to keep its prices low despite inflation, whereas Olive Garden ... hasn't. While Olive Garden does use certain ingredients to keep its prices lower, it appears that isn't enough anymore. 

One of the big things that Olive Garden has always hung its hat on is its affordability. For years, folks could rely on the promise of an Italian (or, at least, Italian-like) meal without breaking the bank. However, in recent years, Olive Garden's somewhat lost the handle on its pricing, creating a gap for chains like Texas Roadhouse to step into. In an earnings call in 2024, Darden CEO Rick Cardenas admitted that the brand was seeing fewer lower-income customers through its doors. In particular, folks who were earning below $75,000 were less likely to be dining at Olive Garden than in previous years.

Now, you can blame that on a lot of things (like inflation, cost of living, and the general desire for folks to save their pennies), but when you see that other restaurant chains are rising up and dominating, you kinda have to look at what you're doing wrong. The answer, it seems, is that Olive Garden's prices are outpacing people's ability to pay for them, leading to a drop in customers that are arguably its core audience.

One of the things about the Olive Garden menu is that it's relatively static, and while it's definitely evolved over the years, it's also largely been defined by its pastas and breadsticks. However, every now and again it takes away customer favorites — and it's clear that this hasn't been received especially well by some folks. Two items that it pulled off the menu, its Steak Gorgonzola Alfredo and its Stuffed Chicken Marsala, were removed during the pandemic, a fact that customers didn't love. At the end of 2024, it announced that it was bringing the two options back, as well as improving on its Never Ending Pasta Bowl by adding a garlic herb sauce option.

Why is this significant? Well, the reintroduction of the dishes and the expansion of the pasta bowl came during a period when Olive Garden was shedding customers. It was clear that people were heading elsewhere for their meals, especially for steak-based options, which Olive Garden was missing one more of by removing the steak pasta from its menu. As such, these dishes coming back seems to be a pretty desperate grab for attention after making some big mistakes that may have cost it some business. On top of that, folks are maybe just tiring of some of the unhealthy dishes at Olive Garden. 

It's pretty brutal out there in the restaurant world, folks. 2024 was a difficult time for restaurants across the board, and 2025 hasn't proved to be the salvation that a lot of people hoped it would be. You can see how urgent the need was to retain customers in some areas through the various discounts that chain restaurants rolled out throughout 2024, with various meal deals flooding the market. There was one business that held out on this trend, though: Olive Garden. Oh, and it cost them, too.

In an earnings call in March 2024, Darden CEO Rick Cardenas faced repeated questions about the logic of offering discounts from investors, which he repeatedly refuted. "We're not going to change our strategy. We're not going to become a discount kind of heavily promotional brand," Cardenas stated in the Darden Restaurants earnings call. "We worked really hard through COVID and before to get to what we think is a better, stable, stronger business for us for the long-term, and we would be willing to deal with short-term pressures to not change our strategy to get to the long-term."

While we understand that logic, it's also clear that other brands have achieved success from discounting and keeping things affordable. Texas Roadhouse, for instance, offers discounts and specials that can allow people to save money — and it keeps its prices on the right side of inflation. Olive Garden does have fan-favorite deals, but that might not be enough.

The bigger the restaurant chain, the more likely it is that something's going to go wrong — and when things take a turn for the worst, the P.R. crisis that unfolds can often hit these joints pretty hard. Olive Garden suffered a big blow back in 2023 when a Michigan customer accused the restaurant of serving him a bowl of minestrone soup with a rat's foot floating in it. Thomas Howie stated that he had placed the foot in his mouth before feeling a stabbing pain and realizing that it was from a claw. Howie sought medical attention and damages from the restaurant, which flatly denied the allegations.

Although many restaurants have endured similar fates and come out the other side, this event came in that crucial period when chains were doing whatever they could to lure back customers after COVID restrictions. Having one of their own accusing them of such a breach in standards is hardly what they want, and probably didn't help much in getting people back through the door. Plus, regardless of whether Howie was telling the truth or not, this moment put Olive Garden's name in the papers for all the wrong reasons.

Chain restaurants often start strong, and then over time, they start to suffer from diminishing returns for their customers. Part of this is that folks simply get tired of their offerings, but a bigger factor is that customers often notice when the restaurants start cutting corners in response to difficult economic circumstances. Accusations of deteriorating food quality have been aimed at Olive Garden for a while now, with people pointing out that it's lost its ability to produce food that feels homemade or authentic — which is, after all, a key part of its appeal. 

"At one point Olive Garden was an actual Italian restaurant," said one defeated customer on Reddit. "The glut of family restaurants gave way to corporations buying out smaller operators, homogenizing the product, and taking their profits from the margins." Ouch. Oh, and the way Olive Garden serves its pasta is a big no-no, too. 

Other people have noticed the drop in quality on a taste level, comparing Olive Garden's food to supermarket fare. Another Reddit commenter mentioned a poor-quality frozen lasagna they'd eaten, remarking, "The taste of plastic was overwhelming and horrible even though I followed the directions completely. A while later I was at Olive Garden and ordered the lasagna. It tasted exactly the same as the one from the grocery store."

You can tell the health of a restaurant by the happiness of its servers. If a chain restaurant is renowned for its cheery staff, you can bet that it's running like a tight ship, with the people working there feeling valued and looked after. If, on the other hand, the servers find working there to be a challenge, then it's a clear sign that something's going wrong — and those bad vibes are guaranteed to rub off on the customers.

Servers have taken to online message boards to discuss how difficult it is to work at Olive Garden, pointing towards poor floor flow, low pay, and bad staff retention. They've also highlighted the fact that Olive Garden doesn't add auto-gratuity for parties of more than eight people, which can lead to a serious limiting of the workers' incomes. This, naturally, leads to disgruntled servers who feel like the company is cutting corners with them — and who wants to walk into a restaurant where the staff feel like they don't want to be there? No wonder people are drifting towards Texas Roadhouse, which ranked as having some of the best customer service around in a 2024 report from Datassential and QSR.

It's not unreasonable to expect large chain restaurants to have fairly watertight sanitation processes. However, sometimes things can go the other way, with restaurants that you expect to be regularly spick and span turning out to be grimy, filthy, and neglected. Unfortunately, Olive Garden has been accused of such things, and both social media videos and sanitation reports have exposed fairly unpleasant issues behind its cheery facade, which have perhaps sent customers scurrying away.

One infamous viral TikTok video from 2021 created a headache for Olive Garden, when a former employee took it to task for its sanitation. In the video, a former employee pointed out that her restaurant had a terrible slug problem in the soda fountain, with the creepy crawlies coming out of the nozzles themselves. Pretty gross, huh?

@spookyshanny

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♬ original sound – spookyshanny

More recently, too, Olive Garden has been put to task online through a 2024 inspection report from an Asheville store. This inspection report noted multiple sanitation violations, including employees not washing their hands properly or using hairnets. Three of these violations were deemed critical, perhaps pointing to a lower standard in the store itself — and it's not unreasonable to think that customers may have noticed. Are folks simply wanting to eat in cleaner restaurants these days? Probably.

Ah, the iconic Olive Garden breadsticks. These sizable chunks of bread are arguably the most appealing thing about eating at the restaurant, and the fact that they're unlimited is obviously a big sell. However, Olive Garden's most famous side dish has, in recent years, proved pretty controversial. In 2024, a TikTok video (well, a video of a picture) went viral of an Olive Garden breadstick with letters printed on it. The letters, which appeared in what seemed to be black ink, were revealed by a commenter to be from the bag that the breadsticks come in.

@fartbubble69420

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♬ eating sound – unknown

Now, we don't know about you, but we're not wild about the idea of printer ink rubbing off on our pieces of bread. Unfortunately, this moment caused a storm for Olive Garden, at a crucial time when they should have been focusing on regaining customer trust and business. What was even worse was how the company reacted. Olive Garden commented on the video asking for the customer to email its customer service department, and it was later revealed that it sent the affected person a $100 gift card. What it didn't do, however, was offer an explanation to the millions of people who had viewed the video. It appeared that the restaurant hid the truth, and this didn't go unnoticed by customers, who likely wanted to eat somewhere else after this.

Legal action can significantly challenge a brand's image, and in the last few years, Olive Garden has had to deal with a fair bit. At the end of 2020, it suffered a dent in its reputation when former employees alleged that they faced race- and gender-based discrimination while on shift. Per People magazine, Adam Jones, an employee at the Times Square Olive Garden who had worked at the branch in 2008, stated that he and other employees faced hostile working conditions. Jones, who describes himself as African-American, stated that both he and other Black employees received worse treatment than non-Black ones, and when he raised these issues with a manager, they were ignored.

Darden, the company that owns Olive Garden, denied the allegations and stated that they were baseless. The firm also hit back by pointing out how much money it had invested in the care of its workers, particularly since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, the lawsuit caused a lot of media noise, with people questioning whether Darden was really looking out for its employees.