Here's How Many People Olive Garden's Jumbo Salad Can Actually Serve
By now almost everyone knows Olive Garden's motto, "When you're here, you're family." But there are times when you'd rather bring Olive Garden home to your own family than go out. For those occasions, the Italian-inspired juggernaut known for its never-ending pasta and pillowy-soft breadsticks has a very convenient catering menu. If you've got a group to feed, whether it's a special occasion or just a Sunday night in, you can get family-sized pans of their signature pastas to mix and match or get a meal combination. Just don't forget to add a Jumbo Salad or two to your order, too, each of which feeds about six people.
A big part of the charm of visiting Olive Garden is a big bowl of salad tossed with fresh veggies and lots of grated hard Italian cheese. So if you're going for an at-home Olive Garden vibe, you definitely don't want to skimp on the salad. For about $20 to $25 per salad, everyone can get their fill of veggies, plus each salad comes with 12 of its famous breadsticks. With a couple of takeout entrees, salad, and maybe a sangria kit, you've got dinner quite literally in the bag — the to-go bag, that is.
What's in a Jumbo Salad?
Everyone always focuses on the pasta at Olive Garden, but their salad is just as famous. It's spawned hundreds of copycat recipes on the internet, but you can't really get the authentic experience unless you go to the source. When you're feeding a crew at home, the Jumbo Salad on the Family Style Meals section of their menu is simply a large portion of their famous salad, all packed up with dressing and cheese to take home. This six-person salad is filled with crisp iceberg and Italian lettuce mix, black olives, plum tomatoes, thinly sliced red onions, pepperoncini, and seasoned croutons. To bring it all together, they toss the salad with grated Romano cheese and their in-house creamy Italian dressing.
It's not super hard to make a dupe, especially since their dressing is available in bottles at most grocery stores, but it's a lot easier to simply order a Jumbo Salad to-go than it is to shop individually for all the ingredients and do all the chopping and grating. If you do the math, at $25 per salad, it works out to about $4 per portion (depending on prices where you live), which is a small price to pay for getting food on the table without the headache of meal prep.
How much salad can one person eat?
According to its website, Olive Garden determines that a portion of salad is five ounces, so a Jumbo Salad works out to be around 30 ounces. This is important to know because if you're throwing a dinner party you want to make sure everyone gets enough salad to eat (if they want it). Parade magazine advises that a good rule of thumb for planning a salad for a crowd is about two and a half ounces of greens and four ounces of chopped vegetables per guest, which aligns fairly closely with Olive Garden's portion size (give or take an ounce). For visual reference, a six-ounce salad roughly equals one and a half cups and takes up as much space as a large, open fistful of salad. So while the OG is known for their large portions of their pastas, their salads are pretty normal-sized comparatively.
Keep those numbers in mind if you have a lot of salad fans in your dinner crew, and don't be afraid to add an extra salad if you think they'll eat more than five ounces of salad. Plus, you should factor in room for seconds. Just be sure to order the salad with the dressing on the side so that you can mix up only what you need for dinner, and if you have leftovers they'll stay crisp for lunch tomorrow.