Olive Garden’s One Healthy Children’s Menu Choice
Personally, I would expect Olive Garden to be one of the healthier options in the restaurant chain choices. After all, they don’t tend to offer too many fried foods and they serve up salad at the start of each meal.
I was a bit off-put to see that Olive Garden doesn’t provide comprehensive nutritional information, however. Beyond that, what they do provide (nutritional details for only items that fall under their healthier “Garden Fare Menu”) is a little disturbing. The entire list of low-fat, low-carb, and no-sugar-added foods includes just one item from the children’s menu. Yes, just one.
The grilled chicken. That’s it. That is the only children’s menu option that is healthy, or worthy of the Garden Fare Menu. They don’t even tell you what the nutritional information is for the other dishes.
That dish (not counting any salad, bread, soda, etc.) has 310 calories and 5 grams of fat. And, of course, you have to hope your child is willing to eat that instead of a more appealing, less healthy option from the children’s menu.
Here is the funny thing. That salad? That comes with the dressing already on it? That you figure is a great thing to feed your children, what with it being salad? In the Olive Garden FAQ, they share the nutritional details of that:
Each two (2) tablespoon serving contains the following: 80 calories; 70 calories from fat; fat 8 grams; saturated fat 1 gram; cholesterol 5 mg; sodium 510 mg; carbohydrates 2 grams; protein 0 gram.
That is also assuming the nutritional information given is correct. The Olive Garden offers a disclaimer for what little nutritional information it does have:
Olive Garden has made an effort to provide complete and current nutrition information, but changes in recipes and the hand-crafted nature of our menu items mean that variations from these values can occur from time to time. Therefore, the values shown here should be considered approximations. In addition, guests who have special food sensitivities or dietary needs should not rely solely on this information as the basis for deciding whether to consume a particular menu item.
This is all good to know before visiting the local Olive Garden, where the salad dressing is nearly all fat and there is but one healthy children’s menu option.
Personally, I don’t find it surprising that ANY chain restaurant (and most “standard” restaurants in general) is lacking in healthy choices, for kids or otherwise. Maybe I’m spoiled in that my kids will generally eat just about anything, but I tend to shy away from kids menus for two reasons: 1 the food is usually more expensive than ordering a regular meal and having them share, 2 the choices are astounding. Mac and cheese, burgers, chicken strips, spaghetti, pb & j; how uninspiring; If I wanted my kids to eat such basic food, we wouldn’t have gone out to eat. Kids cookbooks are by and large the same: uninspired. Order instead off the “a la carte” or “appetizers” section and you’re likely to have much better choices.