Everyone knows that when you’re at Olive Garden, you’re family.
But in the 44 years since the casual Italian-American restaurant chain was founded, few have embraced it with the ardor that Braden Sinclair has. In fact, way back in his Little League days, a coach named him “Breadsticks.”
“I had to go to Olive Garden for my birthday, ate too much, missed an entire game,” Sinclair tells WIRED. “One of my coaches decided that because of my initials being B.S., and my number being 11—which he said looked like breadsticks—and then that story, that I had to be called ‘Breadsticks’ for the rest of the season.”
He maintained that close relationship with the chain for many years, until, in 2019, he was rewarded with an almost unfathomable distinction: Sinclair is one of just 50 human beings on the planet to ever secure an Olive Garden Lifetime Pasta Pass.
Unlike the thousands of 13-week Never Ending Pasta Passes that the chain has offered at various intervals since 2014—this summer, a batch of 10,000, priced at $100 apiece, sold out within seconds—Sinclair’s heavy gold card bears no expiration date. It entitles him to as much pasta, toppings, breadsticks, and soup or salad as he cares to eat, for as long as the chain endures and he remains a loyal customer. (No delivery, though, to be clear. A pasta bowl so bottomless demands that one take a seat of honor for the dine-in experience.)
How exactly does Sinclair wield his kingly rights at Olive Garden? All is revealed on his new website, Lifetimepastapass.com, where he crunches the many numbers—both financial and dietary—on his many meals there. And, with a continually updated poll that decides what he should order the next time he drops in, it’s easily the closest you’ll ever get to having the lifetime pass yourself.
Sinclair nabbed his license to feast during a special promotion, when Olive Garden announced that the first 50 people to buy a temporary pasta pass would have the opportunity to upgrade it to the lifetime pass for an extra $400. To this day, Sinclair wonders if his timing was really that good or if the company deliberately selected him to receive the ultimate prize.
“I had sort of a joking relationship with their Instagram for years, just like chatting back and forth,” he explains, adding that it felt a little “weird” and something like “divine intervention” that he won given his coziness with the brand. An Olive Garden vice president of marketing FaceTimed him with the good news, he recalls.
Reactions to the card from Olive Garden employees range from awe to confusion. “They always take it back to the kitchen, show it to people,” Sinclair says. “Managers will come out and ask questions. The other end of the spectrum has been having to kind of prove it’s real, which is rare, and I totally understand. Like, if I managed a restaurant and someone came in with a gold card that said I don’t need to pay, I would also have questions.”
Now a 33-year-old father of two young kids, Sinclair doesn’t gorge on heaping plates of carbohydrates the way he used to (and, since frequenting Olive Garden makes him more conscientious about the rest of his diet, he’s avoided packing on the pounds). But he says the Lifetime Pasta Pass somewhat justifies his continued fixation on the restaurant, which was a familiar comfort when his family temporarily relocated from Maine to Wisconsin during his childhood. In 2016, he paid homage to the place with a tattoo of its famous rotary cheese grater; the caption reads “SAY WHEN.” He also began collecting vintage T-shirts that the chain had released in the 1980s and 1990s.
This year, Sinclair unveiled the project that brought all of his Olive Garden experiences together in one place. Lifetimepastapass.com documents his “infinite tour of Italy” by showcasing not only his backstory and extensive merch collection but all the data you could ever want about how he has used his rare privilege: number of restaurant visits since 2019 (112), bowls of pasta eaten (152), calories consumed (154,817), meal value ($1,878.87) and total tips ($607.00).
You can also keep tabs on a map of which locations Sinclair has tried—while the South Portland, Maine, restaurant is his home base, he has ventured up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Other charts show his most favored pasta type (rigatoni), sauce (alfredo), and topping (crispy chicken fritta), as well as the monthly frequency of his Olive Garden visits; he dined there nine times in August, the most since he set a personal record of 20 visits in October 2019, shortly after winning the pass.
With a decade of experience in data analytics and visualization, Sinclair saw all this as a fun application of his talents. But he also wanted people to have “skin in the game,” as he puts it—so he built a dashboard where anyone can vote on the combination of ingredients that make up his next pasta order.
“I thought it was just gonna be a joke among my friends,” Sinclair says. “You know, share it on Instagram, so maybe 10 of my friends would go in and vote, and then the next day five, and then the third day no one would care, and it would be over.” Instead, after he shared the project on a couple of subreddits, he was stunned to tally over 700 votes on his next meal. He wound up eating angel hair with spicy alfredo (a new sauce offering) and crispy shrimp fritta.
“A big reason why I wanted to do this is I just kept getting rigatoni with alfredo, five-cheese marinara, and crispy chicken, like on repeat,” Sinclair says. “I was like, ‘I need to branch out.’” His best discovery so far? “I realized that alfredo and meatballs is an insane combination,” he says. “It’s so good.”
In some ways, Lifetimepastapass.com is a reflection of Sinclair’s belief that the card comes with great responsibility. Besides tipping diligently, he also skips the refills, aiming to be a “respectful” and “low-impact” diner who doesn’t flaunt his status or make a shift harder for staff. “I see some pictures of people with the [regular] pasta passes who go crazy,” he says. “Bowls full of grated Parmesan just because they can.” Meticulously tracking his own Olive Garden journey toward various virtual “trophies” earned by hitting benchmarks in categories such as “lifetime breadsticks eaten” (he’ll reach the bronze level at 100, gold at 1,000) and “longest streaks of consecutive weeks with at least one visit” seems, by comparison, a kind of reverence for the institution.
If there’s an unexpected downside to the Lifetime Pasta Pass, it may be a certain loneliness at the top. Because Covid-19 hit shortly after people claimed the cards, the promotion has been largely memory-holed, and whatever plans Olive Garden could have had to celebrate or connect the winners were never realized. Sinclair has stumbled upon only a couple of other passholders via social media and has no idea how often others may go to the restaurant these days.
Meanwhile, it’s not always easy to convince your pals to meet up at a restaurant just because you eat there for free. “There’s only so many times I can go sit at the Olive Garden by myself,” Sinclair says. “I have some friends who are nice enough to go with me, but oftentimes they’ll just kind of sit there and eat some breadsticks.” And though Sinclair’s wife is an admitted fan of the chain—she’s eaten there with him since their high school days and promised in her wedding vows to go whenever he wants—he finds it “wisest” to seek alternatives whenever they manage a kids-free date night.
The good news is that Sinclair’s 4-year-old is a likely Olive Garden devotee in the making. “I’ll probably start bringing my oldest son a little more just because he’s obsessed with pasta,” he says. “I think he’ll genuinely enjoy it.”
Just not before a Little League game, of course.
The post He’s One of Just 50 People With Olive Garden’s Lifetime Pasta Pass. You Choose What He Eats Next appeared first on Wired.
