Olive Garden's Meatballs Look Nothing Like What You'd Be Served In Italy

Spaghetti and meatballs, a combination so classic that it's a mainstay at any Olive Garden you visit. Delicious as Olive Garden's version of it is, you'll likely never see an Italian restaurant serving you massive balls of ground meat and pasta at the same time for the same reason you won't traditionally see pasta served alongside steak.

Spaghetti and meatballs are two halves of a classic Italian meal. However, the spaghetti and sauce comes first as the primo followed by meatballs as the secondo. Italian meatballs, also known as polpette, are about the size of a golf ball and can consist of any combination of meats, though beef and pork is the most common. Their small size allows them to finish cooking in the sauce, transforming a tomato sauce into a ragu that later adorns the pasta.

By cooking the meatballs in the sauce, it imparts plenty of meaty flavor to enhance the pasta. By serving the pasta and meatballs separately, each half of the meal has a chance to shine on its own, focusing on either the sauce for the primo or the protein for the secondo. This method of cooking has also sparked a debate amongst Italian-Americans about why pasta sauce is sometimes called gravy. Aside from this classic combination, there are a few more items on the Olive Garden menu where they don't quite stick to tradition.

From its shrimp carbonara to its soups you can order by the half-gallon, Olive Garden puts an American twist on many classic Italian dishes. In Italy, you won't see pasta topped with steak, but that certainly doesn't stop Olive Garden from serving it's hearty steak gorgonzola Alfredo. Additionally, the Alfredo served at the restaurant adapts to American palates and is quite different from its Italian counterpart. 

Italians make Alfredo sauce with butter and parmesan, melted together until its creamy, and don't use any actual cream. The chain continues its twists on Italian pasta-based recipes with dishes like Lasagna Fritta, a crispy appetizer consisting of fried lasagna pasta topped with meat sauce and cheese, which you would be hard pressed to find in Italy. 

The restaurant's stuffed chicken marsala is beloved by customers, but a truly Sicilian version wouldn't have a carb accompaniment or be stuffed with cheese and sun-dried tomatoes. Similarly, a true Italian scampi requires langoustine shellfish, not chicken, but that won't stop Olive Garden from serving chicken scampi. In the last century, the word has been Americanized to refer to the sauce rather than the proteins, something the restaurant capitalizes on to sell this particular dish.