Olive, anyone?

 Now under new ownership, it has moved from its very pretty location in Churchill Avenue to College Road. We were interested to see if the food was still memorable.
Our date started with some confusion as my UK-based homie thought she had made an error when confronted with a sign advertising the Olive Branch Christian Book Shop. She found the old place deserted but eventually we did meet up in the College Road location which houses the Olive restaurant as well as the Bookshop. The furniture is the same — iron tables with matching chairs and mosaic tops, but the setting not nearly as pretty and feels more like a suburban garden.
The interior is home to the clothes shop from Churchill — but not the antique store which gave much of the ambience to the original indoor space.
Menu is the same — but although it still calls itself a salad bar and coffee shop (at least on the stationery) the salads are a far cry from what they used to be — and more expensive.  Salad making is an art and very few restaurants in Harare get it right. Shop Café is one, Willowmead Junction another. The Olive used to be a third but no longer.
Salad making needs care in the selection and combination of ingredients. The dressing is important and should complement the salad — not be something to slosh over just to make it wet. And unfortunately our haloumi and strawberry was very wet and my friend was left wallowing with a pool of balsamic vinegar at the bottom of her plate. The salads still look pretty but need more attention to detail. The haloumi was overcooked and brittle for example.
I ordered the Olive special green salad (US$12) — a very green mix of leaves, broccoli, green beans, avocado and pumpkin seeds. It was certainly healthy — but needs more care with individual ingredients. Broccoli pieces were too big and needed more scalding. I would have liked them a little softer and able to be nicely coated with dressing. I felt rather like an elephant chewing through mountains of raw vegetation!
Dressing was served on the side and wasn’t very inspiring. Curried broad beans, while tasty in themselves, did not go well with the other ingredients. Salad dressings can be truly inspired but the classic rule is a generous glug of good olive oil, a small amount of vinegar or lemon juice, salt and then your imagination can play with other flavourings.
Pesto dressing (basil, garlic, pounded nuts and oil) is delicious with fresh summer tomatoes. Cumin and orange zest are lovely with butternut and red pepper.
The Olive seems yet another restaurant struggling with identity. The advertised special on the outside sign — which we only noticed when leaving and which wasn’t offered by the waiter — was quarter chicken and chips for US$10.  And the next day I received an e-mail from Eatout offering an Indepe-ndence Day Promotion of Zimba-bwean free range traditional chicken (road runner) with sorghum sadza US$7, tripe stew with maize meals, sadza US$6. These are served with a choice of Pumpkin leaves in Peanut butter or Chomolia. Grandma’s oxtail stew and sadza for US$12. None of this was mentioned at the restaurant just a couple of days before.
We tried carrot cake for dessert  — pricey at US$4 and very disappointing. Too dry, it tasted stale, was overspiced with cinnamon and lacked flavour — a far cry from the moist, buttery cake of the old Olive.
It seems they are rebranding.  Would be good to inform the public!
– g.jeke@yahoo.com