Did TGI Fridays Invent Potato Skins?

You've likely seen potato skins on the appetizer menu at TGI Fridays (and also the branded boxed options in the freezer section of your grocery store), but what's the chain's connection to the popular dish? TGI Fridays has been known to take ownership for inventing the app — as in this 2018 tweet stating that the chain created the skins back in 1974 — but is that origin story actually true? 

In actuality, TGI Fridays' timeline doesn't seem to align with some other potato skin accounts. For instance, there's a well-known story that the dish was actually created three years earlier by Chicago restaurateur Richard Melman. 

Melman opened the city's popular burger joint R.J. Grunts in 1971, and it's widely known to have been one of the first restaurants to offer potato skins on the menu. According to Melman, he had the idea after learning about sailors who ate the skins of potatoes to fight off illness in a radio broadcast. Inspired by the story, he decided to get in his kitchen and play around with recipe ideas until he came up with the potato skin we know today. 

So while TGI Fridays may have helped catapult the app into the stratosphere — and onto Super Bowl snack tables everywhere — it doesn't look like the chain actually invented them. But really, it doesn't matter who created them — we're just happy to live in a world where they exist.

If you want to devour potato skins in a hurry, you can simply pick up the frozen TGI Fridays box at your local supermarket and pop them in the oven, or even order them to-go from the restaurant. But, if you're feeling a little creative and want to make them yourself, potato skins are actually pretty easy to whip together — not to mention totally customizable.

When making homemade potato skins, first you'll want scrub the outside of the potato really well. This is an important step because you and your guests will be eating the skin itself. Once fully cleaned and dried, cook them just as you would a regular baked potato. To make the skin extra delicious we recommend rubbing the potato with olive oil and sprinkling coarse salt on all sides. After they've cooked and fully cooled, cut each potato in half lengthwise, and scoop out the flesh. You can set the flesh aside for other recipes like easy mashed potatoes so that nothing goes to waste. 

Then, fill each skin with your preferred toppings before putting them back in the oven to bake until the cheese is melted and the skin is nice and crispy. The most common toppings are cheese and bacon crumbles, but you can find potato skins with all kinds of garnishes, like ranch dressing, chives, green onions, sour cream, and fun variations like Southwest skins with yellow corn and black beans or even Reuben-style skins with sauerkraut and remoulade.