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May 09, 2023

Olive Garden's bringing back the Never

Guess what's baaack? On Sept. 29, Olive Garden announced that it was bringing

Guess what's baaack?

On Sept. 29, Olive Garden announced that it was bringing back the Never-Ending Pasta Bowl for the first time since it ended the deal in 2019. Thank the pasta gods!

The announcement was made on the Italian restaurant's new TikTok account that was just created on Monday, Sept. 26. Starting that day, the brand's first few clips, released one by one over the week, hinted that an announcement was coming in a saucily mysterious fashion.

"Something is coming," reads Olive Garden's very first TikTok, which shows four different combination bowls of pasta, sauce and meat.

Another cryptic video on the Olive Garden account used a succession of images to spell out the clues "OG Green, Clue, Everywhere, October, Three, Infiniti, Pasta." No one needs to contact Sherlock Holmes to deduce what that might mean. Subsequent TikTok videos of a cat in a pasta bib and a person at a table snapping their fingers to seemingly endless pasta options slowly heralded the official announcement which arrived on the platform on Thursday.

"At our table, anything is possible," reads the announcement TikTok. "Never-Ending Pasta Bowl is back! Starting October 3."

This tasty news comes after reports that now CEO Ricardo Cardenas of Olive Garden's parent company Darden Restaurants suggested that the Never-Ending Pasta Bowl might never return to the menu in an earnings call in Dec. 2021. Thankfully for the pasta-hungry folks of America, this decision has appeared to have reversed course.

We reached out to Olive Garden for more information on the pasta bowl, how long it's going to be available and its cost in 2022, as in previous years the price for the promotion started at $10.99.

"Never Ending Pasta Bowl is a fan-favorite promotion that our guests were eager to see back on the menu, and we’re excited to offer it to them again after two years," said Jaime Bunker, senior vice president of marketing for Olive Garden to TODAY Food.

"This is the 25th anniversary of Never Ending Pasta Bowl at Olive Garden, and it remains one of the most popular offers in our company's history because it reflects exactly what our loyal guests expect when they dine with us: abundant, craveable Italian food at an everyday value," she said. "After so much anticipation, we look forward to celebrating Never Ending Pasta Bowl's return with our fans on October 3rd."

Olive Garden also stated that the starting price for the Never-Ending Pasta Bowl is now $13.99 and that each never-ending topping — meatballs, Italian sausage or crispy chicken — can be added for $4.99. This deal is available for a limited time, and will only run from Oct. 3 until Nov. 20.

Washington, D.C. native Joseph Lamour is a lover of food: its past, its present and the science behind it. With food, you can bring opposites together to form a truly marvelous combination, and he strives to take that sentiment to heart in all that he does.