Considering how quickly Olive Garden's Neverending Pasta Passes sold out last year, you'd think they came with tickets to an Adele concert. But, as it turns out, people are as obsessed with breadsticks as they are the British singer, buying up all 2,000 passes in less than a minute. Before long, they started popping up on eBay, going for up to nine times the purchase price.
That kind of pandemonium has inspired the Italian chain to bring back the passes on a much larger scale, offering 21,000 to carb-fiends nationwide. Each one costs $100, but in return, you'll get seven weeks of being able to stop by the restaurant at any time and gorge on unlimited pasta, soup, salad, breadsticks and soft drinks.
There's a catch, however: You have just one hour to buy the pass, and it's smack-dab in the middle of the average person's work (or school) day. It will only be sold on Thursday, Sept. 15 at 2 p.m. EST, according to Olive Garden's news release. Oh, and there's one place you can get it—no, not Ticketmaster: OliveGarden.com/PastaPass.
The Pasta Pass lets you slather your spaghetti (or angel hair, or cavatappi, or whatever your carb-loving heart desires) with one of five classic sauces, then top it off with chicken, meatballs, sausage or shrimp. It's the first year the brand's offering its most popular dish, Chicken Alfredo, but the protein section is devoid of one key menu item: Pepperoni.
At first, this may seem like a non-issue, until you realize that means you won't be able to order one of OG's newest menu items, Pepperoni Alfredo.
In a twist of marketing genius, the brand found a way to riff on one of its bestsellers, substituting grilled chicken with a cheaper—yet widely beloved—protein. It's a pizza-meets-alfredo mashup for Italian takeout fans everywhere. It'll set you back about 1,230 calories per bowlful (about 130 cals more than the brand's regular Fettuccine Alfredo), so maybe Olive Garden's doing you a favor by not allowing you to feast on it until it gets hard to breathe.
When you consider that the average passholder ate at Olive Garden 28 times during last year's seven-week run—that's one out of every five meals, as CNN pointed out—that kind of moderation seems necessary. At least if you're the type who's less interested in soup and salad and more into breadsticks, pasta and more breadsticks.
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