TGI Friday's Jack Daniel's Glaze Copycat Recipe
Pineapple juice, soy, brown sugar and a small amount of bourbon added at the end. Twenty-five minutes, mostly waiting.
Cooking TGI Friday's at home, and what its menu costs
The Jack Daniel's glaze, and a plate of potato skins that defined a decade.
AI-generated editorial illustration created for food.fast; not a product photograph from TGI Friday's.
The TGI Friday's recipes on this site
Not every menu item has a recipe here, and that is deliberate - We write a page when there is something genuinely worth saying about how to make the thing.
What TGI Friday's food actually tastes of
The glaze is pineapple juice reduced hard. Pineapple, soy, brown sugar, garlic, onion and a small amount of whiskey added at the end so it does not cook out entirely. It must reduce by half or it will not cling - unreduced, it is a thin sweet-salty liquid that soaks in and disappears.
Pineapple is also a tenderiser, which is why the reduction matters twice over. Raw pineapple juice contains bromelain, a protease that breaks down protein, and meat left in it for hours goes unpleasantly mushy at the surface. Cooking destroys bromelain at around 70 °C, so a reduced glaze has none of that problem and a raw marinade does.
The sugar means it goes on late. Last fifteen minutes for ribs, eight for chicken, four for fish. Brushed on at the start of a long cook it is carbon.
Potato skins are baked twice. Bake the potato whole, scoop out most of the flesh, brush the shells inside and out with fat, and bake again until the edges are genuinely brittle before any cheese goes near them. Skipping the second bake gives a floppy skin under melted cheese, which is the entire difference between the dish and a disappointment.
About TGI Friday's
TGI Friday's began in 1965 as a singles bar on Manhattan's Upper East Side and became, over the following two decades, the template for an entire category: the American casual-dining restaurant with stripes on the awning, memorabilia on the walls and a menu three times longer than it needs to be.
It exports one recipe more than any other. The whiskey glaze that goes on the ribs, the chicken and the sesame strips is a sweet, dark, pineapple-and-soy reduction with a whisper of bourbon, and it is the reason people order the same dish for twenty years. It is also one of the more technically interesting things on this site, because it is a genuine reduction rather than a mixed sauce - the pineapple juice has to lose half its volume before it will lacquer.
Beyond that, two items have a real claim on a home kitchen. The loaded potato skins are a masterclass in why baking a potato twice matters, and the sesame chicken strips are the glaze's best vehicle.
The rest of the menu is long, competent and not especially worth reproducing. A fajita platter is a fajita platter. That is not a criticism of the restaurant - a casual-dining menu is designed to have something for everybody at a table of six, which is a different job from being worth copying.
What TGI Friday's charges in 5 countries
The same item, priced from each country’s own menu and converted to one currency so the columns can be read against each other. TGI Friday's sets prices per market, so a gap here is the chain’s pricing rather than an exchange rate artefact – and the widest gap on this list is Brownie Obsession, which costs $9.12 in the dearest market and $4.87 in the cheapest.
| Item | 🇬🇧 GBP | 🇨🇦 CAD | 🇮🇪 EUR | 🇲🇾 MYR | 🇹🇭 THB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $8.93 | $9.12 | $6.16 | $4.87 | $8.94 |
Only items TGI Friday's prices in at least 5 of the markets we hold are listed, because a row with three figures in it is a gap rather than a comparison.
What TGI Friday's sells nearly everywhere
Ranked by how many of the markets in our price data carry the item with a published price. This is computed from the menu tables, so it reflects what the chain actually sells rather than what it advertises.
| Menu item | Markets priced | Recipe |
|---|---|---|
| Brownie Obsession | 5 | - |
| Loaded Potato Skins | 4 | - |
| Caesar Salad | 3 | - |
| Fish & Chips | 3 | - |
| Fried Mozzarella | 3 | - |
| Mac & Cheese Bites | 3 | - |
| Seafood Platter | 3 | - |
| Chicken Quesadilla | 3 | - |
| House Salad | 3 | - |
| Chipotle Yucatan Chicken Salad | 2 | - |
| Kid's Marinara Pasta | 2 | - |
| Ribeye Steak | 2 | - |
Other casual dining chains
What else people compare TGI Friday's against, and what we hold for each.
TGI Friday's is a trademark of its owner. food.fast is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by TGI Friday's. Recipes on this page are our own interpretations, not the company’s formulas.