The Best Olive Garden Soup To Order With Your Salad And Breadsticks
It's hard not to love Olive Garden's never-ending soup, salad, and breadsticks deal for less than $20. It can be the perfect lunch option or the perfect warmup for one of Olive Garden's entrees. We ranked every soup at Olive Garden and recommend the Zuppa Toscana as the best soup option.
As a point of order, we found all of Olive Garden's soup options to be underwhelming. While a hot bowl of soup can be enjoyable, all of them failed to deliver on their full flavor potential. That said, the Zuppa Toscana is the best of the worst. Made with kale, potatoes, and spicy Italian sausage in a creamy broth, this soup complements the salad and breadsticks well enough ... when all the elements are there. The broth is a step in the right direction compared to the chain's other soups, the kale adds crunch, and the potatoes add flavor, but it needs enough spicy Italian sausage for it to all come together, which was lacking in our taste tester's batch. While none of the individual elements wowed us, there was hope for a better future experience. As a thicker soup, it's a good choice for breadstick dipping when you get all of those flavors soaked into the broth and a good yin-yang pairing of warm soup with cold, Italian-style salad.
The best Olive Garden meal to have with your Zuppa Toscana
Once you've enjoyed a warm bowl of the best soup at Olive Garden, it's time to enjoy one of its best meals. Olive Garden offers a litany of options, including gluten-free and vegan dishes. In terms of the absolute best Olive Garden dishes, we recommend sticking with the classics.
When the chicken parmigiana is perfectly cooked, customers who order it are treated to incredible flavors. The rich flavors of both pasta and chicken pair perfectly with marinara and parmesan cheese for a home run. Likewise, the chicken Alfredo is an incredible option that's best enjoyed at Olive Garden, despite legions of dupe recipes. For those who like variety, the famous Tour of Italy features chicken parmigiana, lasagna, and fettuccine Alfredo, each of which is packed with flavor.