Top Secret Restaurant Recipes: An Urban Legend?

Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 10:17 am

Does your favorite restaurant really have recipes so top secret that their employees are forbidden to reveal them, on pain of firing or even worse, such as being sued?

I have long wondered this myself. So I asked the managers of three of my favorite eating places, all belonging to major chains, about it. Specifically, I asked them if they would give me the recipes for some of their most popular dishes. The results were quite interesting.

One manager had the requested recipe already printed up and readily handed it to me. "People love this one so we're happy to give it to them," he said. I asked him if he was worried that his customers would start making it themselves at home and would stop coming to his restaurant. He didn't seem concerned. "People come here for the dining-out experience as much as for the food, to relax and be waited on. They can't get those things at home."

It was a different story at the second restaurant I tried. The manager there politely but firmly refused my recipe request. The most he would do is tell me the ingredients, but as for quantities and and how to put them together, it was no go. "Our headquarters guys would kill me," he said with what I hope was overstatement.

At the third restaurant, the manager said he wasn't at liberty to give me the exact recipe I asked for. He had the cook come out and tell me most of the ingredients and how they are mixed and cooked, but he said there were two "secret" spices he couldn't reveal to me. He claimed that those spices gave the dish its special zing that made people so crazy for it.

Based on this admittedly limited experiment, I would say that, yes indeed, many restaurants do indeed have their own "top secret" recipes--but not all. If you love a particular dish at a restaurant, don't hesitate to ask for the recipe. You might be pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to get.

On the other hand, don't take it personally if you are refused. Major restaurant chains spend a lot of money developing and testing new dishes and marketing them to the public. When they have a winner on their hands they may be understandably reluctant to let the recipe out into the public where anyone--including a competitor--can get hold of it.

Fortunately for us foodies, some pretty smart people have figured out many of these top secret recipes and put them into books for us. Some of the best of these books--because they are constantly updated as new recipes appear--can be downloaded from the Web.

So yes, there really are top secret restaurant recipes. The good news is, they don't have to stay "top secret" to you. The information is out there; you just need to know where to look.

Sarah Sandori is the food and entertaining columnist for the Solid Gold Info Writers Consortium. Have you ever wanted to be able to exactly duplicate a favorite dish from a favorite restaurant? Check out Sarah's article where she reveals her source for the most mouth-watering secret restaurant recipes in America: http://www.solid-gold.info/most-wanted-recipes.html

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sarah_Sandori

Author: Sarah Sandori

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