Description

Top Secret Restaurant Recipes: Creating Kitchen Clones from America’s Favorite Restaurant Chains – Todd Wilbur Book Description Publication Date: June 1, 1997In 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! Editorial ReviewsLong 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. From Booklist 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 Biography Food hacker and host of CMT’s “Top Secret Recipe,” Todd Wilbur is the author of a series of unique cookbooks which reveal simple secret recipes for creating home versions of America’s most popular brand-name foods. With over 5 million Top Secret Recipes books in print, Todd designs each recipe through careful research, trial-and-error, creative reverse-engineering, and obsession. Readers will not only be fascinated with the back stories and impressed with the accuracy of the formulas, but will also find that they can save money when recreating these signature dishes at home and will enjoy the ability to now customize their favorite foods to suit specific diets and health concerns.Todd has appeared on numerous talk shows in the 24 years he has been cloning famous foods, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dr. Oz, Today Show, Live! with Regis & Kathie Lee, Good Morning America, Fox News, Rachael Ray, Maury, and The Food Network. Season 1 of “Top Secret Recipe” debuted on CMT in October, 2011. When not taste-testing recipes on himself, his wife, his friends, and TV talk show hosts, Todd is busy teaching his 3-year-old daughter how to identify herbs in a sauce at their home in Las Vegas, NV. http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-Restaurant-Recipes-Creating…