Top Secret Restaurant Recipes: Creating Kitchen Clones from America's Favorite Restaurant Chains: A Cookbook

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by Todd Wilbur

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In 1996, Americans spent over $100 billion gobbling up meals at full-service American restaurant chains, inspiring Todd Wilbur to change his focus from cracking the recipes for convenience store foods to cloning the popular dishes served at these sit-down stand-bys. Wilbur's knock-offs, absolutely indiscernible from the originals, are selected from national and regional chains, many drawn from a list of the top ten full-service restaurant chains, including Houlihan's, Red Lobster, and Pizza Hut. Also included in this savory cookbook is a special section devoted to dishes from hot theme restaurants such as Hard Rock Cafe, Planet Hollywood, and Dive! Recipes include: Applebee's Quesadillas; Denny's Moons Over My Hammy; Bennigan's Cookie Mountain Sundae; The Olive Garden Toscana Soup; The Cheesecake Factory Bruschetta; T.G.I. Friday's Nine-Layer Dip; Pizza Hut Original Stuffed Crust Pizza; Chi-Chi's Nachos Grande, and many more! Long before scientists in Scotland cloned Dolly the sheep, Todd Wilbur was hard at work replicating recipes from some of America's favorite restaurant chains. Armed with Ziploc bags for transporting leftovers and plenty of questions for his servers, Wilbur has combined the skills of a private eye and a research scientist to devise the tasty clones included in Top Secret Restaurant Recipes . Wilbur honed his technique on convenience food, creating exact duplicates of everything from a Big Mac to a Twinkie; in this book, however, he sets his sights on slightly more sophisticated fare. Within these pages you'll find sure-fire recipes for such chain favorites as Hard Rock Cafe's Famous Baby Rock Watermelon Ribs, Cheese Blintzes from the International House of Pancakes, and The Olive Garden's Hot Artichoke-Spinach Dip. Denny's, Shoney's, The Cheesecake Factory, and Pizza Hut are just a few of the many chain restaurants from which popular menu items have been "cloned." So the next time you have a hankering for Tony Roma's World Famous Ribs or a slice of Red Robin's Mountain High Mud Pie, don't bother to go out--instead, eat in with Top Secret Restaurant Recipes . As restaurant chains proliferate, their food expresses a culinary Gresham's law: bad food drives out good. Wilbur, building on the popularity of his books revealing McDonald's Big Mac special sauce and Twinkies' filling, continues to plumb the shallows of chain-restaurant cooking. Here he tells the home cook how to make favorite dishes from such popular chains as Planet Hollywood, Hard Rock Cafe, and dozens more. What Wilbur cleverly uncovers are legal constructs more than culinary creations (witness the blizzard of trademark bullets appearing next to virtually every name). Wilbur's blueprint diagrams of food add to a perception of these comestibles as food engineering. Nevertheless, this book will be eagerly sought by library patrons delving for just the sort of chain-restaurant secrets Wilbur unveils. Mark Knoblauch Praise for Todd Wilbur's   #1 bestselling Top Secret Recipes series "[Wilbur's] problem isn't that the recipes he's devised aren't good enough, it's that they're too good."— Entertainment Weekly   "There is something magically compelling about the idea of making such foods at home...The allure is undeniable, and [the books are] stuffed with tidbits and lore you're unlikely to find anywhere else. These probably come as close as you can get to the original recipes."— Boston Herald   "This is the cookbook to satisfy all your cravings."— Juli Huss, author of  The Faux Gourmet   "The recipes are easy to follow and... by preparing your own versions of restaurant meals you will almost always save money."— Arizona Daily Star   "[Wilbur's] recipes use everyday supermarket ingredients to bring brand-name foods to the home kitchen. Perhaps not surprisingly, his recipes are not complex. If anything, they reflect how easy home cooking can be."— Star Tribune   (Minneapolis--St. Paul)   "The assignment: Find out how to make the tasty Jack Daniels Grill Sauce used by T.G.I. Friday's restaurants. The client: Oprah Winfrey. The gumshoe: Todd Wilbur. Mission Impossible for even the most savvy food expert. But not so for Todd Wilbur, a crackerjack culinary sleuth."— Pocono Record    "Many of [Wilbur's] dishy imitations come, like a box of Cracker Jacks, with a surprise inside."— Mademoiselle It's no longer necessary to stand in line for a table at T.G.I. Friday's or Red Lobster. You can make the menu items you love right at home - with ingredients from your local supermarket. In this unique cookbook Todd Wilbur re-creates more than 100 signature dishes from America's most popular chain restaurants - including such hot theme eateries as the Hard Rock Cafe, Planet Hollywood, and Dive!. Wilbur's easy-to-make knockoffs, the products of years of research, are indiscernible from the originals - and the most ingenious way we know of to cut down on the cost of eating out. But watch out, once you start cooking, people may start calling f

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