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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

‘Tour of Italy’ comes to life

Olive Garden contest sends Spokane Valley couple on a dream culinary adventure through Southern Italy

Richard “Dick” and Lynda Brautigam eat at Olive Garden every three or four months. When they’re traveling stateside, it’s their go-to restaurant.

They remember eating at the casual dining Italian chain last autumn during a trip through the south central U.S. While Dick Brautigam said he doesn’t remember entering any contest, he’ll never forget the grand prize: a trip for two to southern Italy.

The couple recently returned from a culinary tour that took them from Rome to Sicily and back with one of Olive Garden’s senior executive chefs, Paolo Lafata, a native of Sicily.

It was all expenses paid.

“And it was all first class,” Dick Brautigam said. “They spoiled us.”

When Olive Garden introduced two new Tour of Italy menus last year, customers were invited to vote for their favorite dish. Six dishes – three from the Southern Tour, three from the Northern Tour, all inspired by the regions in which Lafata or chef Flavio Tagliaferro grew up – were available for a limited time. Each vote entered the diner for a chance to win a trip to Italy to tour the region that inspired his or her favorite dish.

“I didn’t even know I was entering to win a trip to Italy,” Dick Brautigam said. “I didn’t even remember I filled it out.”

So when he received an email in January informing him he might have won an Italian vacation, he thought it was a scam. The email gave him three days to respond.

“I wrote, ‘I am responding to this email,’ and then I waited for my iPad to explode,” said Dick Brautigam, a retired optometrist who met his wife on a blind date. They’ve been married 31 years, live in Spokane Valley and have four children and five grandchildren.

Italy had long been on their bucket list. They’ve traveled abroad to other places: Sweden, Norway, Germany, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Scotland, the Cook Islands.

They had hoped to make it to Italy when Dick Brautigam retired three and half years ago. But those plans just didn’t come to fruition.

So when they learned they won the Olive Garden’s Culinary Tours of Italy Southern Tour Sweepstakes, the couple decided to add two weeks on their own before the whirlwind, weeklong Olive Garden excursion.

Plus, Dick Brautigam said, “I looked at that itinerary, and I knew with jetlag we wouldn’t make it.”

The Brautigams, both 69, left May 1, flying into Milan, where they stayed one night, then taking the train to Venice, where they spent two nights. After that, it was off to La Spezia, Cinque Terre, and Florence, where they spotted Tom Hanks shooting “Inferno,” the third installment of the “Da Vinci Code” series. Then, they spent a week with a rented car, driving from town to town in Tuscany, including Siena and San Gimignano.

The Olive Garden tour ran May 17 to 23. Back in Rome, the Brautigams met the other winning couple, a husband and wife from Michigan who got to tour northern Italy. Then, Dick Brautigam said, “It was go-go-go.”

The Coliseum. The Pantheon. The Vatican. Two-hour lunches. Three-hour dinners.

“We were exposed to a lot of food,” Dick Brautigam said. “We had two big meals a day, and it was wonderful. The presentation was absolutely beautiful. They’d say, ‘Do you want red or white (wine),’ and we’d say, ‘Whatever.’ We would just eat for hours.”

Eggplant. Sea urchin. Squid. Lobster. Pesce crudo (raw fish). Pizza. Water buffalo mozzarella. Panna cotta. Cannoli. Gelato.

“There were so many courses,” Lynda Brautigam said.

At Olive Garden, her favorite is Chicken Scampi.

Dick likes to order different dishes. “I love their breadsticks. I love their salad,” he said.

After two days in the Eternal City, their South-of-Italy entourage flew to Sicily, where highlights were visiting the ancient Greek theater in Taormina and, of course, eating. Some days, the wake-up call came at 6 a.m.

On the fifth day, they flew to Naples and drove south along the coastline to the Cilento region and the fishing village of San Marco di Castellabate, where they selected fresh seafood aboard a boat: shrimp, monkfish, St. Peter’s fish – otherwise known as tilapia – with its distinctive thumbprint-like mark on its back.

The next morning, they watched an Italian chef prepare the seafood they picked out during a presentation-style cooking class.

That afternoon at a ranch in Capaccio, they watched water buffalo get massaged and milked, then ate fresh mozzarella – “We had it so many different ways. We even had mozzarella gelato,” Dick Brautigam said – before it was back to Rome.

“We did things we probably never would have done,” Lynda Brautigam said.

“We just loved the people. We loved the food. And we loved the experience we had,” Dick Brautigam said. “This trip was incredible. The worst part was the flight home.”

In the next morning’s newspaper, the couple read the Olive Garden in downtown Spokane had closed. It was sad news for the Brautigams, but not the end of the world.

“We liked that one,” Dick Brautigam said. “But our favorite one is in Coeur d’Alene.”