Reviewing Olive Oil (and other rants and praises)

Too often I find myself dining out in a lovely new restaurant, impressed by the ambiance, service, and look of the menu, while after ordering, the server carries over a basket of bread and pours some olive oil into a little white dish to whet the pallet. "UGH!- what is this?!" I exclaim to myself with the unfortunate taste of the first oil-soaked piece of bread I put in my mouth, "Really? They call this olive oil? Is this the best this restaurant can do?"

While my reaction may seem extreme, I feel that all too often restaurants try so hard in their kitchen, getting their menu and presentation just right, but make the unfortunate mistake of overlooking the important introduction to one's whole dining experience - the bread and olive oil. For whatever reason, be it cost, lack of knowledge, or lack of awareness of the customer's knowledge, chefs seem to not think much of placing a bottle of adulterated, and often rancid, olive oil out on the table for the customer's bread-dipping pleasure. As an avid olive oil connoisseur I take many issues with this. Often the chef decides that whatever 'olive oil' he's using for sauce making, frying, etc. in the kitchen is just as acceptable for the customers to eat raw and pour all over their food. I feel this is a huge disservice to the customer, not only in that it is an offense to the pallet, but that it is not allowing the customer the pleasure of experiencing what a true, fresh and robust, extra virgin olive oil can really taste like.

Restaurants are notorious for watching their costs to every penny and that is why the food service industry is one of the toughest markets to sell quality products. The extra virgin olive oil they think they're buying at a great price (a too-good-to-be-true price), is often not extra virgin or even 100% olive oil. They're often adulterated with refined oils such as canola or soy, or are of terribly low quality, old and rancid - and this is the stuff that ends up out on your table in that pretty little glass bottle. My advice to the restaurants is, fine, buy the cheap oil, but keep it in the back kitchen where it belongs, and do us all a favor and spend a few more pennies and buy a quality 100% extra virgin olive oil to put out on the tables. If you can't do that, then don't even bother putting any oil out on the table at all and go back to butter.

After too many disspointing olive oil experiences, and a few surprisingly great ones, I've decided I need to start spreading the word and have opened a Twitter account. My posts can be found here on my blog and on my Twitter page. Here I will tweet to my little heart's desire any time I want to express my opinion about what I'm seeing, tasting, and experiencing in the realm of olive oil. Feel free to jump on board and join the conversation: Follow @LoveforLathi