This isn’t their exact recipe (which they keep sealed away in an under-ground vault guarded by fire-breathing dragons), but it’s pretty darn close. I kid you not, there have been times that we’ve eaten at a GAR restaurant solely so we can get THIS for dessert. And one that reportedly won a $5,000 nationwide dessert competition (for good reason).Īlthough we don’t live that far from a few of their locations, none are super-convenient at 9:00 pm on a Tuesday night when a chocolate waffle craving strikes. This is an homage to a fantastic dessert that is the source of MANY cravings. This isn’t a review for their restaurants (all of which are, as the name would suggest, g reat). The restaurant group runs a chain of restaurants in the Washington, DC metro area.

There has been one dessert that we’ve yearned to replicate for many moons: A flourless chocolate waffle to be found at pretty much all of the Great American Restaurants (GAR). So, although we’ll often come back from vacation with the desire to recreate a dish, we normally aren’t aiming to recreate something verbatim with the intentions of adding it to our regular rotation. The secret to good restaurant food is generally fresh ingredients and a lot of butter. Why spend two hours in my own kitchen making KFC fried chicken when I can drive down the street and buy it in less than five minutes? Plus, we’re a Popeyes household…Ģ. There’s no good reason to re-create chain restaurant food at home. Now that I’m older and wiser slightly less ignorant, I realize a few things about restaurant food:ġ. I hadn’t really discovered food at that point and I had no intention of making anything in the book, but I did want to know the secrets. I can’t recall the title of the book, but it was filled with copy cat recipes from “America’s favorite restaurants.” As a young, and mostly ignorant child, I was highly curious as to how my favorite restaurant fare tasted so darn good.

It was a cookbook, but not any cookbook! No. At some point during the early 90s in a used bookstore in Northern Virginia, I discovered a book that I believed would yield the key to all the secrets of life.

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