Olive Garden’s Never-Ending Pasta Bowl promotion has been a fan favorite for years. It’s easy to understand why. Customers get unlimited refills of pasta, sauce, and toppings for one fixed price.
It’s meant to be enjoyed at the table, with fresh, hot portions served throughout your meal.
But some customers apparently saw it as an opportunity to stockpile free meals for the week. One server is calling out the behavior while sticking to restaurant policy.
Customers Don’t Touch Food—Why?
In a viral video with more than 4.3 million views, server @zdumbwitit shows the aftermath of what appears to be an attempt to game Olive Garden’s popular Never-Ending Pasta Bowl promo.
The camera pans across a table absolutely loaded with food: four soups, five pasta bowls, two Alfredo sauces, and two salads that had been combined together. None of it is touched.
“POV When the guest, walk out because they kept ordering the never ending pasta bowls without eating it & wanting Togo boxes,” the text overlay reads.
“They ain’t touch not one of they food my brother,” the server says in the video, clearly frustrated. “This is crazy.”
According to the caption, the customers ate “a couple bread sticks” before announcing their plan: “My kids have dinner for a week.”
When @zdumbwitit told them they couldn’t take all the uneaten pasta bowls to go, they got mad and left.
The result? A table full of perfectly good food that will be thrown away.
The server’s frustration isn’t just about the waste. It’s about customers who misunderstood (or deliberately ignored) the terms of the promotion and then got upset when the restaurant enforced its policy.
What Is The Never-Ending Pasta Bowl?
According to CNN, Olive Garden’s “Never Ending Pasta Bowl” has been a menu staple since 1995, returning annually (except for a brief pause during the pandemic). The deal costs $13.99—a price the chain has held steady for four consecutive years despite inflation pushing menu prices at most restaurants up more than 30% since 2020.
Customers can choose from four pasta shapes (fettuccine, spaghetti, angel hair, or rigatoni) and six sauces (including alfredo, marinara, and meat sauce), plus toppings like crispy chicken or meatballs for an additional $4.99.
The deal also includes unlimited soup or salad and Olive Garden’s famous endless breadsticks. The promotion runs from late August through mid-November and is timed around back-to-school season when “people have a lot of expenses” and “consumers are looking to save,” according to Olive Garden’s senior vice president of marketing.
How does Olive Garden make the math work at $13.99? The chain likely profits from additional purchases like appetizers, desserts, and cocktails. Plus, with nearly 1,000 locations, Olive Garden buys pasta in such bulk that they’ve secured favorable pricing from suppliers. The promotion brings customers in the door, and most people naturally self-regulate their consumption based on appetite rather than maximizing every dollar.
Economics Of All You Can Eat
The economics of all-you-can-eat deals are fragile. According to The Hustle, buffets operate on extremely thin margins. For every $20 in revenue, $19 goes toward overhead, leaving just $1 (5%) in net profit.
These promotions work because restaurants assume most customers will eat a reasonable amount at the table, typically two or three servings. NPR explains that flat-rate pricing models depend on customers self-regulating through natural appetite limits and satiation.
The Waste Problem In Restaurants
The sight of all that untouched food hits differently when you consider how much food restaurants already waste.
According to Move For Hunger, American restaurants generate between 22 to 33 billion pounds of food waste annually. Half a pound of food is wasted per meal served, whether from customers’ plates or in the kitchen itself. And 85% of unused food in a typical American restaurant gets thrown out rather than donated.
That’s a staggering amount, given the millions of Americans who are food insecure.
Commenters React
“The fact the restaurant rather throw it away then just let them take it to go,” a top comment read.
“Yeah so im a server at OG and im not like this. AS LONG AS YOU PAY I DONT CARE IF YOU DONT EAT IT AND WILL GLADY BOX IT UP FOR YOU,” a person said.
“Server should have never brought the second one til the first one was finished,” another wrote.
“There’s a difference between taking Togo food and trying to work the system. They failed. As a server for years this isn’t on you. God forbid you follow a policy even if it is Olive Garden,” a commenter added.
@zdumbwitit 4 soups, 5 bowls , 2 Alf sauces( the free way), 2 salads ( that they added together) All untouched!!They ate a couple bread sticks and said “ my kids have dinner for a week “ then get mad about it. 😂🤦🏾 #foryou #olivegarden #server #serverlife #serverproblems
BroBible reached out to @zdumbwitit for comment via Instagram and TikTok direct message and comment and to Olive Garden via email.