Olive Garden customer discovers whole, unpeeled potatoes in soup

Olive Garden’s Zuppa Toscana is a beloved and popular soup that brings people together Share their copycat recipes online with many Who just have to imitate its taste themselves.

While all of these recipes list potatoes as an ingredient, none of them instruct people to throw a whole, unpeeled potato into the pot during cooking. But that’s exactly what this TikToker named Mely (@melybaby_xo) I found her lying at the bottom of the container of things she had bought from the chain.

Millie shared her surprising discovery on a viral TikTok which had more than 696,000 views as of Sunday. “It’s not the Olive Garden doing this to me,” she wrote in the caption of the video.

Her clip begins with a shot of a container of… Zuppa Toscana For the restaurant housed inside a box decorated with the iconic Italian-style casual dining chain’s branding. There is a large ladle inside the gallon of soup, and Millie grabs it and starts swirling around in the container, scooping the soup around.

“It seems normal, doesn’t it?” She says, laughing a little as she continues to move the ladle. She then pushes a large serving spoon to the bottom of the bowl and scoops a large clump from the bottom to reveal that the restaurant has placed what appears to be a whole, unpeeled potato inside the dish.

“But what a complete silly potato,” she says before zooming in and laughing some more. “I can’t make this up.”

While Millie thought it was certainly strange to discover a large, whole potato inside her soup that the Olive Garden chefs may have forgotten to cut, one commenter thought things could have been much worse for her.

“This is truly a better case scenario than what could have been in this bowl,” they wrote.

Another speculated that the potatoes were put into the soup as a way to absorb some of its salt content, writing: “Maybe they made it too salty and tried adding the potatoes and forgot about it.”

@melybaby_xo No Olive Garden does me like that lol wtf #Olive Garden #olivegardenfail #Nutritional failure #ZopaToscana ♬ original sound – MelyBaby

While a potato’s defense against salt may seem like an odd way to combat over-seasoning a dish, as it turns out, it’s a tried-and-true method for desalting soup, according to Southern living.

“Try this method if you’re making a chowder or vegetable soup… Peel a potato or two (or more depending on the size of the pot) and boil them in the pot with the soup. Simmer them for about 30 minutes to absorb the excess salt.” When you’re done, Just remember to remove the potatoes from your soup.”

The outlet said the potatoes should be salted, but from the looks of Millie’s video, it looks like the Olive Garden cook just threw the eggplant in the pot and walked away to prepare his millionth serving of never-ending pasta for the day.

Another said: “Maybe they didn’t have enough soup, so they put it in there to fill it up.”

Millie, who commented that a gallon of soup cost her about $38 with breadsticks, thought that was the restaurant’s logic as well. However, some could not understand how the person serving the dish did not notice the potatoes.

“How did they not notice that when they prepared it?” They wrote. “I accidentally added a potato but not the scoop.”

It seems a TikToker was luckier than another Olive Garden restaurant who also discovered a surprise soup while visiting one of the chain’s locations: Cricket. People who enjoy some canned soup on their own have also made discoveries: like this Campbell’s customer who noticed a strange teabag-like sac floating in their delicious liquid meal.

The Daily Dot reached out to Mely via her TikTok comment.