Who invented the giant baked potato that you see on steak chain menus such as Del Frisco’s, Morton’s, Ruth Chris, Capital Grille, etc?
Like all stories that become legends, the real truth many never be known. What we do know is that, Toffenetti’s, one of the earliest restaurant chains, with locations in Chicago and in New York City, certainly had a hand in making the humongous baked Idaho potato famous, and forever identifying our state with the one pound monster potato. Here is what was written about it in The Aristocrat in Burlap, a book about the history of the Idaho potato industry. One of the great boosters for the Idaho baking potato was a Chicago restaurant owner named Dario Toffenetti. Toffenetti stated that he got started buying and serving Idaho potatoes because of a particular lot that was in storage in Chicago that nobody wanted to buy. This lot of potatoes proved to be one that had been shipped by Joe Marshall to Chicago, and they were all of exceptionally large size. It was an experimental shipment in which all of the smaller tubers had been removed, and the lot probably consisted of potatoes weighing 12
