Did Chicago invent potato skins? A Super Bowl food mystery

The big picture: The appetizer can be found on most menus, but Chicagoans may not know that Lettuce Entertain You claims to have invented them.

• Owner Rich Melman says he added them to his R.J Grunts menu when the iconic restaurant opened in 1971. He said the dish was inspired by his interest in health food at the time, after he'd heard a tale about sailors eating the skins to stave off illness.
• "It was never a gigantic seller," Melman told Eater in 2017. "From my recollections, maybe we sold 10 a day or so."

Zoom in: Melman said customers would get creative with the skins, thanks to the restaurant's other famous invention, the salad bar.

• "We would serve [them] with sour cream and chives on the side, but people often made up their own ways of doing it. You could go to the salad bar and put vegetables on it, put chili on it, put cheese on it."
• Melman said the remainder of the potatoes were used to make the restaurant's cottage fries.

The intrigue: Melman's sons confirmed that their dad believes potato skins were his invention in a recent podcast interview. They explained that the R.J. Grunts' kitchen was so tiny that the cooks needed to use everything up, so they didn't have to store anything.

Yes, but: A restaurant in D.C. and the TGI Friday's chain also lay claim to the invention.

Yes, but, but: We don't write for Axios D.C. 🙂

The bottom line: When you are biting into your fully loaded potato skin on Sunday, be proud that you may be eating a little-known Chicago classic.