Why It's Worth A Try Asking For An Out Of Season Olive Garden Dish

Many people have a love-hate relationship with seasonal dishes and limited-time offerings at restaurants. On one hand, there is a distinct excitement when you head to your favorite eatery to try something new. But if the seasonal offering quickly becomes your favorite dish, you could very soon be disappointed when it leaves the menu. Seasonal dishes are offered by restaurants for lots of reasons: some ingredients like certain produce are best served during a certain time of year when they can be found and prepared fresh. Limited-time dishes also encourage people to visit restaurants more often so as to not miss out on the latest offerings. While it's great for business, fans don't tend to love when their preferred dishes don't stick around.

Luckily, just as there are secret ways to order discontinued Olive Garden items, you can also score seemingly "limited time only" dishes long after the seasons have changed. Of course, like many restaurant hacks, it depends on what each location has in stock and how willing your servers and chefs are to make you an off-menu item. But if you play your cards right with an extra wide smile (and possibly an extra good tip), you may not have to wait until next year to indulge in your favorite seasonal Olive Garden offering.

The Olive Garden menu has evolved over the years, but some staples have always remained. You might be surprised to learn that many of the mainstay menu items can be used as a base to build other limited-time offerings. As long as they have the ingredients in stock, chefs are happy to whip up certain seasonal dishes like the chicken fettuccine Florentine, which can be prepared simply by asking for spinach to be added to your chicken fettuccine. You may have to be slightly flexible when asking for certain off-menu dishes: Some seasonal offerings, like Garlic Herb Chicken con Broccoli, call for a specific type of garlic Alfredo sauce that chefs might not have on hand. However, they can try to get as close as possible with the Build-Your-Own pasta, adding pasta shells, broccoli, and cream sauce together with some parmesan and some minced garlic. It may not be exactly the same, but you can get pretty close.

On the other hand, there are certain dearly departed items that the Italian food chain just doesn't carry anymore, such as the Bolognese and steak gorgonzola dish, though it's always possible that ongoing clamor from fans will lead to a rerelease of menu items that can't be recreated as easily with their kitchen staples.

Olive Garden regulars took to Reddit to mourn their favorite dishes that have not made a return in quite some time. One user reminisced, "Olive Garden used to have seafood stuffed mushrooms. I think it's now cheese and breadcrumbs or something awful like that." Another claimed, "Stuffed chicken marsala from Olive [G]arden is my heartbreaking loss." Dishes like these are far less likely to be whipped up by chefs today since they require more specific ingredients like seafood stuffing and marsala wine sauce. Of course, you could still ask your server, but the chances of them remembering what dish you are referring to and having those specialty ingredients in stock are extremely slim.

A few dessert options have come and gone from Olive Garden's menu as well, toying with the hearts of fans who love a little something sweet after a meal of pasta and breadsticks. One Reddit user and former employee of the chain shared that "their raspberry cheesecake and lemon cake were to die for... Both gone." Other items like the popular chocolate lasagna have remained on the menu, but have gone through major ingredient changes over the years, and fans have definitely noticed.