The Truth About Olive Garden's Infamous Italian Cooking School

Back in 2010, CNN reported Olive Garden did, in fact, have a culinary institute located in Tuscany. This came after a TV ad for Olive Garden showed their chefs in Italy taking part in a fancy cooking school set against a gorgeous Tuscan background, which led people to question if it was a real thing. Olive Garden spoke about it in a 2010 Facebook post featuring a photo of the Italian countryside, and confirmed the rumors were true. According to the post, the Culinary Institute of Tuscany was located in Castellina, a town in Chianti — and, at the time of the post, was the cooking school where over 1,000 Olive Garden managers were trained. Olive Garden claimed every winter since 1999, their best chefs and managers were sent to complete an 11-week training program at the culinary school, located inside a property called Riserva di Fizzano Relais, a medieval village and resort. In the off-school-season, it operated as a bed and breakfast.

In addition to sending their chefs to the institute, Olive Garden also held sweepstakes to give its customers a chance to learn some tips at the Tuscan cooking school. People who claimed to have won the sweepstakes said they were, indeed, taught lessons about cheese, olive oils, and wine. However, it's not known if actual cooking was involved in these cases. Then again, as time has told us, it's unknown if actual cooking lessons actually occurred at the Culinary Institute of Tuscany at all — and if the school was even a real school.

"School" is a bit of a stretch, as far as the reality of the Olive Garden Culinary Institute of Tuscany is concerned. It was definitely a real place, but the details were not exactly as Olive Garden presented to the public. According to a former Olive Garden manager in a Reddit AMA thread, the institute was basically a bed and breakfast. In the attached restaurant, Olive Garden employees would gather for an hour, here and there throughout the trip, to talk about spices (or similar), before spending most of the day sightseeing. And they claimed they only saw the restaurant's chef one time, as they posed for photos with employees while making a Bolognese sauce.

The real situation was not a culinary school teaching chefs how to thoughtfully make the Olive Garden's best dishes. Rather, it was an all-expenses paid trip to Italy at an off-season bed and breakfast for selected managers and chefs. In that sense, it could be termed as false marketing, which angered people back in 2011. This didn't stop people from going to the chain, though – Olive Garden was the number one casual dining restaurant in the U.S. from 2018 to 2024. It's not explicitly known if Olive Garden still sends its employees to Tuscany, but since the company no longer advertises the institute on its actual website page, signs point to probably not. Then again, maybe the chain has just gotten better at hiding its secrets.