The Best Olive Garden Soup To Choose For Your Soup And Salad Combo

Olive Garden is an Americanized version of an Italian paradise. Its never-ending soup, salad, and breadsticks are a cult favorite for adult diners and kid foodies alike. The lunch special for the soup salad and breadsticks will cost you a little less than the dinner, but both are very reasonably priced. It can be difficult to decide which soup to order but we've simplified the process by sampling and ranking them from worst to best for you. 

Olive Gardens makes all of its soups with fresh ingredients daily, which helps explain why we're so obsessed. Luckily, you don't have to choose just one soup. The policy allows patrons to have as many bowls of each as they want so long as they dine in. But if we were going to be stranded on a desert island and could only bring one of Olive Garden's soups with us, we would definitely be bringing the Zuppa Toscana. This soup checks all of our boxes for its texture, flavor, taste, and ingredients.

Zuppa Toscana is Italian for Tuscan soup, named after the region of Tuscany in West Central Italy. The soup is chock full of flavor, from the spice in the Italian sausage to the oils in the broth. This soup gives you just the right balance between chunkiness and broth, so there's not too much liquid left over once you're finished. The texture of the kale is the perfect contrast to the potatoes and the kale also gives the soup a little bit of a crunch, adding another layer to the texture profile. The broth itself has a buttery creaminess that tastes divine when you sop it up with Olive Garden's complimentary breadsticks. The Parmesan cheese, which is grated upon request atop any of your dishes at Olive Garden, is the perfect finish for this soup. 

You could also duplicate this recipe at home and even purchase a cheese grater that's less expensive than the ones they use at Olive Garden to top your soup with fresh grated Parmesan. But to really enjoy this soup to its fullest, you must dine in and get the full Olive Garden experience that delights us so much.