Olive Garden Vs Carrabba's Italian Grill: Who Has The Best Chicken Alfredo

Most sit-down Italian-American restaurant chains aren't really trying to reinvent the wheel. Rather, common comfort food staples like lasagna, chicken Parmigiana — which is no different from chicken Parmesan — and, of course, fettuccine Alfredo serve as the main attractions at spots like Olive Garden and Carrabba's Italian Grill. Simply put, there's little need for innovation when these classic permutations of cheese, carbs, sauce, and sometimes meat are all so fundamentally satisfying.

But some sit-down Italian-American restaurant chains still do the basics better than others. I visited both my nearest Olive Garden and Carrabba's Italian Grill locations and ordered a chicken fettuccine Alfredo at each (technically, it's called Fettuccine Carrabba at the latter restaurant, but it's effectively the same thing) so I could pit them against one another in a head-to-head competition. While the dish is simple in composition, the two approaches to the same, simple idea at Olive Garden and Carrabba's turned out to differ quite a bit more than they resembled one another. Here's how my two entrees fared in eight categories, before my pick for which restaurant makes the superior chicken Alfredo overall.

Visually, there were three key differences between my chicken Alfredos from Olive Garden and Carrabba's Italian Grill. First off, bigger pieces of amply seasoned chicken from Olive Garden stood out pretty significantly compared to smaller pieces of merely grilled chicken from Carrabba's. Second, there was a distinct lack of sauce on top of my Carrabba's Alfredo. While I soon found out that it wasn't necessarily undersauced, most of its sauce had sunk to the bottom of its container. To make sure that this wasn't just happenstance, I looked at some photos of the same dish ordered in-restaurant and found that this is typically how chicken Alfredo is served at Carrabba's — presumably the byproduct of a thinner sauce recipe.

The final major difference was the inclusion of peas and mushrooms in the Carrabba's Alfredo. More than just adding color, I felt like those veggies indicated a relative healthfulness, especially in conjunction with the hidden sauce factor. With that said, the bountiful and indulgently coated chicken from Olive Garden, coupled with ample sauce on top, resulted in what I found to be a more visually appealing approach to chicken Alfredo.

A preliminary eye test gave little insight into how the portion sizes of my chicken Alfredos from Olive Garden and Carrabba's Italian Grill compared to one another. While it's already difficult to estimate the relative sizes of bowls of pasta, two differently shaped takeout containers complicated matters even further. I hazarded a guess that my portion from Carrabba's was larger before pulling out a kitchen scale for a more definitive answer.

According to my scale — and including both dishes' takeout containers, which it's safe to assume were somewhat comparable in weight — my Olive Garden Alfredo weighed 657 grams, while my Carrabba's Alfredo weighed 716 grams. It's worth noting that there was more chicken overall in my Olive Garden Alfredo and, naturally, more veggies in my Carrabba's Alfredo. So, customers prioritizing, say, protein from meat or nutrients from veggies might care more about the quantities of those ingredients than sheer volume. But on the whole, I found that Carrabba's served me a larger portion of chicken Alfredo than Olive Garden.

As is apparent from their respective appearances, the chicken at Olive Garden comes coated in ample seasoning by default whereas the chicken at Carrabba's Italian Grill is simply grilled. To the best of my knowledge, both restaurants use chicken breast meat. One major differentiator between the two is that Carrabba's describes its chicken as "wood-grilled," and that came across in its taste — so strongly, in fact, I suspect the addition of an artificial flavoring component. Finally, Olive Garden's individual chicken slices are larger than what Carrabba's serves.

First off, the coating on the Olive Garden chicken is, unsurprisingly, to its benefit. Not only does it add some satisfying heft, but it imbues the chicken with plenty of flavor, adding up to a pretty tasty piece of chicken. It's almost too salty, but that's par for the course, given that an arguably shady thing about the Olive Garden menu is its excess use of salt. On the other hand, the smaller sizes of the chicken pieces at Carrabba's makes them easier to incorporate into a pasta bite, whereas the larger Olive Garden chicken slices pretty much have to be broken up first. With all of that said, I also found that Olive Garden cooked its chicken better than Carrabba's. My chicken from the latter was a little dry. So, while each kind of chicken offers its own unique benefits, I thought the chicken in my chicken Alfredo from Olive Garden was better than its counterpart from Carrabba's.

Just how much my fettuccine pasta at Olive Garden differed from the pasta at Carrabba's Italian Grill might have been the most surprising element of this head-to-head. While noodle quality isn't typically one of the first things to stand out about a pasta dish — a great sauce on mediocre pasta is vastly preferable to a mediocre sauce on nice pasta — these two particular kinds of fettuccine were about as different as could be.

What's most notable about the fettuccine from Carrabba's is its firmness. There's a sort of wavy shape to the noodle that's upheld by some inherent heft, the same way a proper ramen noodle from, say, one of the best ramen restaurants in the U.S. is heftier than an instant ramen noodle. Its yellow color even evokes the yellowness of non-instant ramen. Meanwhile, the fettuccine at Olive Garden is softer, adhering to no shape whatsoever and retaining a degree of looseness. It's also physically thicker than Carrabba's fettuccine, so even if it's softer, there's a bit more noodle to bite through. Altogether, the better noodle most likely comes down to personal preference. For what it's worth, the firmness in Carrabba's fettuccine made for what I found to be the superior pasta of the two.

To compare the Alfredo sauces from Olive Garden and Carrabba's Italian Grill, I started with back-to-back bites of pasta and chicken from each, keeping the sauce foremost in my mind, before trying small spoonfuls of each sauce plain. I found that the biggest differences between the two Alfredo sauces were that Olive Garden's version was thicker and cheesier while the Alfredo from Carrabba's was thinner and more buttery — though a sort of blander approach by Carrabba's is most likely by design.

Because of its sharper and more umami-rich cheesiness, to the extent that there's a perceptible grated Parmesan texture within the sauce, the Olive Garden Alfredo felt more complete to me by default. Even though you need a lot of butter for a copycat Olive Garden Alfredo sauce, the cheese still comes through pretty prominently. However, the milder Alfredo from Carrabba's is, notably, served with shaved Parmesan in-restaurant, and I received a Parmesan packet with my to-go order. That butter-forward flavor, then, is apparently intended to make room for a Parmesan topping. Nevertheless, even if Carrabba's opts for what could be considered a fresher sort of Alfredo sauce, I preferred Olive Garden's take. Simply put, Olive Garden sticks to the basics, resulting in a simple and indulgent execution of a fundamental Italian-American recipe.

First of all, one key factor both Olive Garden and Carrabba's Italian Grill got right was including ample but non-excessive amounts of sauce in each restaurant's chicken Alfredo. Differentiating the ratios of ingredients in the two dishes were a considerably larger portion of chicken in Olive Garden's recipe and the addition of vegetables in Carrabba's recipe.

While it was difficult to actually add up every single piece of chicken — some were buried under plenty of pasta and some were in pieces — I estimated that there were somewhere in the ballpark of 12 pieces in my Olive Garden Alfredo compared to about eight in my entree from Carrabba's. With that said, Carrabba's compensates for a lesser volume of chicken with peas and mushrooms, both of which I thought nicely contributed to the dish's flavor. Furthermore, even if a larger quantity of chicken adds value, the unwieldiness of Olive Garden's bigger pieces combined with their abundance sometimes made it difficult to put together proper bites. For the flavor its veggies added and its chicken pieces coming in a more user-friendly form, I found that Carrabba's chicken Alfredo came out ahead of Olive Garden's take on chicken Alfredo with a more optimal ratio of ingredients.

From Olive Garden, one serving of fettuccine Alfredo with grilled chicken — which is technically the type of chicken the dish comes with by default, even if it's coated in a breading-like seasoning — totals 1,570 calories, 95 grams of fat, 56 grams of which are saturated fat, 2 grams of which are trans fat, 430 milligrams of cholesterol, 2,290 milligrams of sodium, 96 grams of carbs, 5 grams of fiber, 6 grams of sugar, and 81 grams of protein. One Fettuccine Carrabba totals 2,040 calories, 122 grams of fat, 77 of which are saturated fat, 3.5 of which are trans fat, 460 milligrams of cholesterol, 2,570 milligrams of sodium, 133 grams of carbs, 7 grams of fiber, 9 grams of sugar, and 93 grams of protein.

The Carrabba's Italian Grill chicken Alfredo not being as nutritional as the Olive Garden chicken Alfredo in every metric honestly surprised me. Something about Carrabba's recipe seemed cleaner to me, but that must have been a delusion induced by the mere inclusion of some veggies. Even if certain Fettuccine Carrabba data points are perhaps lower per-calorie, it's safe to say that on the whole, Olive Garden's chicken Alfredo is the nutritionally preferable dish.

Adding up what I received in total at each restaurant in my takeout orders, my Olive Garden pasta came with a bowl of soup, breadsticks, and a tiny mint chocolate, whereas my Carrabba's Italian Grill order came with a cup of soup and sliced bread. The former cost $21.49 before tax at my local Olive Garden whereas the latter was $23.94.

To be fair, that extra $2.45 reflected the larger size of Carrabba's chicken Alfredo relative to the same thing from Olive Garden. That said, the servings of soup and bread that come standard at Olive Garden are quite a bit heftier than what comes with an entree at Carrabba's. For one, the quantity of soup I received — and of course, dining in means a theoretically larger serving, courtesy of the iconic Olive Garden unlimited soup and salad deal — was bigger than my soup from Carrabba's by a factor of two or three. Plus, the restaurant threw in twice as many breadsticks as my order said it would include. So, even if the pasta portion size at Carrabba's exceeds that of Olive Garden, based on a lower price point and a much more significant volume of sides, value-conscious customers should opt for the chicken Alfredo at Olive Garden.

If it weren't deeply unsatisfying to declare this contest a tie, I would be tempted to say the chicken Alfredos from Olive Garden and Carrabba's Italian Grill were equal — before breaking them down category by category, I enjoyed them so equivalently, I waffled back and forth on my winner for a couple of days. But as it turned out, Carrabba's chicken Alfredo was less healthful than I anticipated. That caused an upset in the nutrition category and won five categories for Olive Garden compared to three for Carrabba's.

Olive Garden's win isn't just technical, however. Imagining a scenario where I was presented with both kinds of chicken Alfredo and could only choose one, I would honestly opt for Olive Garden's for competently delivering exactly what the dish should. The buttier version of chicken Alfredo with vegetables at Carrabba's is good enough to compete, but not so interesting or unique that it supersedes the straight-up classic, amply cheesy, and outwardly indulgent chicken Alfredo from Olive Garden. Plus, even if its ingredient distribution is less ideal and its pasta of a lower quality, it's hard to argue with a superior chicken and a tastier sauce. After all, sauce and chicken are about ⅔ of the chicken Alfredo equation. After detailed analysis, then, Olive Garden's chicken Alfredo walks away with the win.

In order to compare the chicken Alfredos at Olive Garden and Carrabba's Italian Grill, I placed online orders for each restaurant's signature chicken Alfredo entree at the locations nearest to my home in the suburbs of Las Vegas. Opting for to-go orders allowed me the unique opportunity to taste them side-by-side. Based on a later opening time at Carrabba's, I staggered my orders so that I could pick up my food soon after it was ready at both restaurants.

Once I got home, I alternated trying food from each dish in one sitting, all while noting my impressions. Initially, I tried a couple of regular bites to see how they worked in their totality, before dissecting them and comparing chicken to chicken, pasta to pasta, and sauce to sauce. Then, I finished about half of each serving, ensuring that the majority of my mealtime was spent eating each chicken Alfredo how I would if I were having a regular meal. Neither chain had any indication that my orders were for the sake of an article.