What’s your favorite part of eating at Olive Garden? Easy — it’s the cheese. Who doesn’t love that moment when the server comes to your table and grates some fresh cheese on your pasta? You hear those six sweet words “let me know when to stop,” and then watch it pile and pile and pile until that block of cheese is no more.
Oh, are we the only ones who do that? We can’t be!
Anyway, did you know that the cheese they grate isn’t parmesan? Don’t worry, we’re not here to go on and on about how Olive Garden isn’t “authentic Italian food” and say that they don’t even use real cheese, and what you’re eating is some sort of artificial parmesan product — what we mean is the type of cheese straight up isn’t parmesan. It’s another cheese.
Romano to be exact. I know this for three reasons.
- I love cheese enough to know that it doesn’t taste like parmesan. It lacks that fruity, nutty, complexity of a great parm, instead it’s much milder and a bit more salty with a softer texture.
- The last time I was at Olive Garden I straight up asked the server, and they said “It’s Romano.”
- When you order Olive Garden to-go you get packets of grated romano cheese, not parmesan. It’s not the same cheese they grate at the table, but the flavor is identical.
Swapping parmesan for romano makes sense when you consider romano is much cheaper and is somewhat in the ballpark of parmesan flavor-wise.
This is important to know because the holiday season is coming up and you might be considering buying that OG Cheese Grater — which the brand now sells on its website —as a gift. Since a lot of people assume the cheese is parmesan, you should probably inform whoever you’re buying the grater for that if they want to recreate the experience of eating at Olive Garden, they’re going to want to load up the grater with romano.
According to Reddit boards and TikTok’s the exact brand Olive Garden uses is Lotito Romano Cheese. We think the brand doesn’t matter here, and suggest you just go with a high-quality pecorino romano for best results.
Source: https://uproxx.com/life/what-kind-of-cheese-does-olive-garden-use/
