Anna Marie Erickson likes the Olive Garden's soup and salad special on several levels: the food itself, its healthy qualities and its authenticity.
Erickson, who is half Italian, says the Olive Garden passes her ethnic taste test.
Erickson is no ethnic slouch. She's so Italian, she recently spent a weekend with her son and family putting up a little batch of Italian sausage.
How little was that batch? "Only 75 pounds,' she said.
We met at 12:30 p.m. on a Thursday at the restaurant, where I found Erickson waiting in a short line, holding an LED-studded pager whose lights had just gone off. Our table was ready and we walked to our table in the nearly full restaurant.
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Our waitress handed us menus and asked if she could interest us in an appetizer and something from the bar, but we declined, asking for peach iced tea to go with our soup and salad specials.
Erickson chose the minestrone and I, inspired by her tale of sausage-making, chose the zuppa toscana, which includes sausage and potatoes. "They've got a lot of good soup here and they're all just as good. I wouldn't pick out one favorite,' she said.
Erickson still cooks Italian favorites, including rigatoni with meat sauce, although not as much as she did while raising a family. Her grandparents came from the Bologna region of Italy, "which is a little different cooking style than Tuscany,' she explained.
Erickson also enjoys Bellisio's and, when she's in the mood for Mexican, Little Angie's and Mexico Lindo in Cloquet.
When our food arrived, Erickson further explained her nomination. "I love this salad, I love their dressing,' she said. "I don't know what it is. Everything's fresh, and they don't pour it on, they just coat it.'
As for the soup, "I like that they have fresh vegetables and beans in it, and it seems hearty, but it's not too heavy either,' she said.
TOM'S TAKE
Although I usually eat exactly what my guest eats, I passed on the minestrone. I've had it before and although it's well-made, its broth is too thick and tomato-ey for my taste.
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So I chose the zuppa toscana. Based in a thin broth of chicken stock and heavy cream, its sausage, russet potatoes, red pepper flakes and bright green kale bits looked as good as they tasted. Despite the visibility of the pepper flakes, the soup seemed only mildly spicy to this fire-eater.
On my second bowl of soup (the meal includes free refills of soup and salad), I noticed finely diced onions, which were translucent and almost invisible. And there seemed to be a hint of garlic, although I didn't see any bits floating around.
There's something I like about this particular combination of ingredients, whose earthiness and colors and aromas seem made for each other. Except for the sausage, it's similar to a longtime favorite recipe of mine, potato and kale soup from Deborah Madison's "The Greens Cookbook.'
The tossed salad was good but not as outstanding as the soup. Its mixed lettuces were fresh and crisp and all the vegetables -- the tomatoes, sliced red onions and red cabbage, pepperoncini -- were presented attractively. Being offered fresh-grated Romano cheese is a nice touch, too. The olive oil vinaigrette was well-balanced and reminded me a lot of my family's regular dressing: Newman's Own, but with a little less oil.
The meal also includes breadsticks, which are one of the weakest items on the Olive Garden's menu. As opposed to the scratch-made flavor of the zuppa, these taste prefabricated all the way.
THE DISH: OLIVE GARDEN
All of the Olive Garden's soups are fresh-made daily. "It's recipe cooking, nothing out of a bag,' said general manager Jerid Courneya. The minestrone contains fresh vegetables, beans and pasta in a tomato-based broth. At 164 calories, it's one of the restaurant's "Garden Fare' low-fat entrees.
The zuppa toscana is spicy Italian sausage, cavolo greens (a type of kale), russet potatoes and heavy cream. It's one of 12 recipes inspired by the Olive Garden's culinary school in Tuscany, where all of the chain's culinary managers are trained, Couryea said.
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The salad dressing, an Italian vinaigrette with pecorino-Romano cheese, is for sale only at Olive Garden restaurants for $4.25 a bottle, he said.
NEXT WEEK JACK LE VASSEUR HAS A BURGER AND MALT AT THE TAPPA KEG INN
