189 dishes from 16 restaurant chains, worked out ingredient by ingredient.
A copycat recipe is an attempt to rebuild a restaurant dish from the outside in. You eat the thing, work out what is in it, and get as close as the ingredients you can actually buy will allow.
Some are simpler than they look. Nando's peri peri salt is mostly chilli flakes, smoked paprika and dried lemon peel, and once you know the lemon is in there it stops being a mystery.
Others are easy to get wrong. Peri Tamer is the mildest sauce Nando's makes, sweet and smoky rather than creamy, so a version built around cream or herbs will taste nothing like it no matter how carefully you follow the steps. Subway's MVP Parmesan Vinaigrette is two parts oil to one vinegar with Dijon holding it together, and getting that ratio wrong is the difference between a dressing and an oil slick.
The approach on every recipe here is the same: name the ingredients, explain the one technique that actually matters, and say plainly where a home version will differ from the original.
They are organised by restaurant below, because that is usually how people search. If you know the dish but not the chain, the full A to Z further down lists all of them.
Wagamama's noodle dishes lean on a teriyaki sauce and buckwheat soba rather than the thicker udon most copycat sites default to. The steak and salmon versions share the same base sauce; the difference is cook time, since a salmon fillet wants far less heat than a seared sirloin.
Nando's sauces vary more in flavour than in heat. Peri Tamer is sweet and smoky rather than the mild-equals-creamy assumption most copies make, the sweet chilli jam is built on red peppers rather than pure chilli, and the Sunset Burger stacks peri chicken with cheddar and avocado rather than relying on the sauce alone.
The Starbucks recipes here are mostly the drinks and bakes people cannot easily recreate without a barista machine. The sweet cream is built from double cream and vanilla syrup rather than a store-bought creamer, and the yogurt parfait is layered the way the chain actually serves it, not blended together.
Taco Bell's fresh sides do more work than the fillings. The pico de gallo and breakfast salsa share the same tomato, onion and jalapeno base, just cut and seasoned differently, and getting that balance right matters more than what meat goes underneath.
Chick-fil-A's sauces share a honey or mayonnaise base rather than being wildly different from each other. The honey roasted BBQ and Polynesian sauce both start from honey, which is why swapping one for the other on a sandwich barely changes what you taste.
The Chipotle recipes that matter most here are the components rather than a single assembled bowl. Black beans cooked from dried rather than tinned, and a pico de gallo built on ripe tomatoes, are what actually change the result at home.
Dishoom's Bombay-style dishes rely on whole spices left in the pot rather than a pre-mixed powder. The mattar paneer uses pureed tomato instead of cream for its base, and the biryani rice is finished separately from the meat before the two are layered together.
Wingstop's flavours split into two families: wet sauces like Hawaiian and Mango Habanero, and dry rubs like Cajun. The difference matters for technique, since a dry rub needs the wings properly dried before frying or the coating will not stick.
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