Top Secret Restaurant Recipes: Restaurant Food At Home?

Note: This is my first cookbook review, so if I have not included enough information, please let me know what I need to add. Thanks in advance!

I have been visiting the Top Secret Recipes website for years, and I own several of the “TSR” cookbooks.

If you are not familiar with Top Secret Recipes, allow me to provide a brief explanation. Todd Wilbur, the creator of top secret recipes, has produced a series of clone recipes to mimic popular products. These products range from grocery items to fast food items to sit-down restaurant items.

In his cookbook Top Secret Restaurant Recipes, Wilbur takes on full-service chain restaurants. The cookbook contains recipes from:

Applebee’s
Benihana
Bennigan’s
Big Boy
California Pizza Kitchen
The Cheesecake Factory
Chi-Chi’s
Chili’s
Cracker Barrel
Denny’s
Dive!
Hard Rock Café
Hooters
Houlihan’s
IHOP
Lone Star Steakhouse
Marie Callender’s
Olive Garden
Outback
Perkins
Pizza Hut
Planet Hollywood
Red Lobster
Red Robin
Ruby Tuesdays
Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse
Shoney’s
Sizzler
Stuart Anderson’s Black Angus
TGI Friday’s
Tony Roma’s
Western Sizzlin

As you can see, this is a veritable treasure trove of restaurants. They vary in cuisine type, geographic location and price range. Also, the Dive! chain is no longer in operation, so recreating the recipes is the only opportunity that fans of the restaurant have if they want to eat those items. Along those lines, this recipe book is extremely appealing to people who want to try an item from a restaurant with no locations near their house. Perhaps they had to move to a different state or they ate at a restaurant when they were on vacation.

Each restaurant has recipes for between one to five menu items. The recipes themselves are a nice mix- there are appetizers, breakfast items, sandwiches, main dishes, soups, salads, sides, desserts, and even a couple of drinks (all non-alcoholic).

I have had great success with many of the recipes I tried. I tried making the Cracker Barrel hash brown casserole before I dined at a Cracker Barrel, and I actually enjoyed my version of the casserole more than theirs. On a related note, the same thing happened with my clone version of Chili’s boneless buffalo wings- I actually like my version more than the restaurant version (that boneless buffalo wing recipe is not included in this book). I have also made the Walkabout Soup from Outback, the Applebee’s Pizza Sticks, Benihana’s Fried Rice, Planet Hollywood Chicken Crunch, and several others.

Each recipe has a similar set-up. The recipe is identified by its name at the top of the page, followed by its description from the restaurant menu. After that, there are a couple of paragraphs of notes about the dish’s popularity at the restaurant and perhaps some suggestions for purchasing items for making your own clone version.

This is followed by a list of ingredients and then a step-by-step guide for preparing the item. Many of the recipes that call for actual assembly (like sandwiches and desserts, among others) also have a blueprint-like illustration that shows the home chef the order in which to layer menu items. There is no nutritional information.

All of the recipes I have attempted to make have turned out well, but this book is not without its flaws. To begin with, the book is a large paperback and is ill-suited for cooking. I have to find some heavy object in order to keep the book open, and this obscures my view of the page I am trying to look at. Also, the pages are printed on regular paper and are not very resistant to inevitable spills and stains.

Many of the recipes are spread out over several pages; often when I am going through the step-by-step directions, I will see that I have to add (for example) the cheese. But the ingredient list is on another page, so I have to flip back to the last page to see how much cheese I need and then flip forward to continue with the recipe. This is especially tiresome when factoring in that the book doesn’t stay open very easily.

The book is also poorly organized. The recipes are not categorized by type, but rather by restaurant. This can make things harder to find, and is not exactly the most logical.

Wilbur kindly provided eleven different pairings of book items for theme dinners- three regular dinners and then more specific pairings like an Italian dinner, a country-style dinner, a lunch, and ideal party selections. For example, Wilbur suggests the following for “munching while watching the big game”:

Hooters Buffalo Chicken Wings
Olive Garden Hot Artichoke and Spinach Dip
Pizza Hut Original Stuffed Crust Pizza

In order to prepare these items, you would have to flip back and forth between the three recipes, and then attempt to keep the book open while you prepare the recipes.

Many of the big recipe books like Pillsbury and Better Homes and Gardens come in a binder-type format. If the Top Secret Restaurant Recipe book was also in that format, then the user could choose to arrange the recipes by restaurant or by type. The binder would also allow the user to place the recipes for the theme meals together for better organization/meal preparation. A larger book would also allow for the ingredient list, the preparation instructions and the blueprint to all appear on the same page.

Despite my complaints, I would still recommend the Top Secret Restaurant Recipes. There is a wide variety of menu items to choose from, as well as a wide variety of restaurant. The recipes I have made are delicious, and while it’s not the same as dining out, it’s a fun alternative to dinner mainstays like tacos and meatloaf. This review would be rated much higher if the book was better organized and not like a (large) paperback book.