As restaurants have become more sophisticated about their menu offerings, more and more home cooks are being tempted to try to duplicate their favorite eatery's tastiest dishes in their own kitchens.

Finding favorite restaurant recipes can be a chore, but by no means an impossible one. All of the following have worked for me:

1. Ask the restaurant for the recipe. This is most direct way, and works more often than you would think, so don't be shy. Ask your waiter to ask the cook. If that fails, ask the restaurant's manager. You'll find that local, independent restaurants are more likely to be happy to give you their recipes than are the chain establishments, but it never hurts to ask. The most they can do is say no.

2. Write to the restaurant's headquarters, if its' part of a chain. In my experience, you will receive a politely written turn-down about three-quarters of the time--but one-fourth of your requests may strike culinary gold!

3. Search the Internet for your favorite recipe. There are chat boards out there where people share restaurant copycat recipes. The main problem is that you can't know which are for real and which are not. You'll frequently come across recipes claimed to be exact restaurant clones, but that never turn out quite right. So, fishing the Internet for restaurant recipes is a gamble, but you're only investing a little time--and sometimes you can get lucky.

4. Go to the bookstore and look for one of the several compilations of top-secret and most-wanted restaurant recipes that have been published in recent years. Most of these are quite good, and the recipes appear to be authentic. The only drawback is that restaurants--and their top recipes--come and go, and printed books might not be timely enough to include that newest hot dish that you and your family are hankering to make.

5. Download a secret recipes e-book from the Internet. There are several of these available, and the ones I've checked out do a great job of telling you how to clone the best recipes from the all the major restaurant chains. They are also inexpensive, considering the work that must have gone into them to find and test all those recipes. Their biggest advantage is that,being in digital form, they can be (and are!) updated frequently.--so you're practically guaranteed that your favorite recipe, no matter how new, will be found within.

There may be other ways to get hold of your favorite restaurant recipes. These five are the ones that I know. If one doesn't work for you, try another. You will succeed.