Does Olive Garden Limit How Much Parmesan Cheese You Can Get?

No trip to Olive Garden is complete without the grated cheese moment. It's part of the experience, that moment in the meal when your pasta arrives and starts to get a seemingly never-ending cheese shower from a grater until you tell the waiter they can stop. But if you have ever wondered if there's a limit to how much Parmesan they can actually grate for any one customer, the answer is ... there isn't.

At least not officially. Olive Garden has never published or acknowledged any official type of cap on how much cheese one individual can have grated onto their plate, nor is there any internal guideline that says servers have to cut the cheese supply off past a certain moment. The open-ended setup is intentional, creating the same atmosphere as the chain's unlimited breadsticks or the never-ending pasta deal, one that's based on comfort, generosity, and an almost theatrical dining experience. Any true fans already know that one of Olive Garden's worst-kept restaurant secrets is that the cheese isn't weighed in ounces, it's just measured in how long you're willing to keep nodding for it.

On a Reddit thread for Olive Garden employees, one server quoted the 2004 movie "Mean Girls" in talking about the Parmesan limit: "The limit does not exist." This is a nod to the fact they are expected to keep grating until the guest says so. And in the same thread, perhaps not so surprisingly, another server shared that they've shredded three whole blocks of Parmesan for one customer, while their boyfriend has apparently shredded four. Comments from users on Facebook mention someone who asked for 26 whole blocks in one sitting, and a Newsweek report described a diner who let the grating go on for so long that the server ran out of cheese and had to go get more. Despite the fact that Olive Garden's Parmesan blocks (which may not even be Parmesan at all) are not the full-size blocks you'll find in the supermarket, we certainly hope these extremely cheesy moments aren't too common. 

After all, at a certain point, the situation starts affecting other things. As one employee explained on Reddit, the limit is "until it limits the server's job... I can't be there for 10+ mins." So it's much more of a human limit than it is a rule. And it will come up eventually because the servers have a lot on their plates (pun intended) between juggling multiple customers and the steady flow of food coming from the kitchen. Most of the time, it probably never gets as far as the server having to be the one to call it, but clearly, sometimes it does. And, in a restaurant that is built on the back of America's love for abundance, that might be the closest thing Olive Garden has to a limit.