The Olive Garden Side Dish You Didn't Know You Could Actually Customize

When you think of Olive Garden, the first things you think of are probably its endless breadsticks (which it keeps a wild supply of on hand), soup, and salad since you can get any combination of those dishes with your meal. One thing you may not have realized is that one of those is customizable — the salad. That's because it always comes to you in a giant bowl, fully assembled, dressed, and tossed. 

Normally they're built with a crisp salad mix, red onions, black olives, tomatoes, whole pepperoncini peppers, and croutons. But according to a Reddit thread, you can actually customize the salad to your liking provided you ask your server before it comes out. One user, commenting as an employee, says, "We have a salad bar in the back and add everything to the bowl from the bar. For two people it's two tomatoes, two olives, one scoop onions, few scoops of dressing and everyone only gets two yellow pepper plus the lettuce of course." Because of this, you can then ask for ingredients to be omitted or add extra of something (for me, it's the pepperoncini) before you get that waterfall of cheese (which isn't parmesan, by the way) added on by your server.

One thing Olive Garden's missing on its menu is a full meal salad. In fact, its house salad is the only salad available. For those of you watching your carbs you're not going to have a ton of options thanks to all the pasta on the menu. That being said, there's one little trick you can do to create a light meal, and that's to order a side of protein to put on your salad. 

Olive Garden sells both crispy chicken and grilled chicken, which you can get on the side (and add to the salad yourself). There's also meatballs and sausage, though those admittedly aren't things people often add to a bed of greens. At my local Olive Garden, that extra side of chicken will run you $4.29 for fried and $5.29 for grilled. This also breaks up the monotony of just veggies and vinaigrette, so it's kind of a fun option if you're feeling a bit peckish and aren't in the mood for soup. Go ahead, feel free to ask for a few extra olives while you're at it.