Just a few years ago, if you wanted your favorite restaurant's food at home, your only choice was to place a takeout order. And even when you did that, somehow the food never quite tasted the same as it did in the restaurant.

Then, some smart kid in the marketing department came up with the idea of offering a few restaurant favorites in the frozen-foods case.

This actually isn't as new a concept as it sounds. Stouffer's, one of the biggest names in frozen food, was originally a highly regarded restaurant chain. If you've stayed at a Renaissance Hotel recently, your room might well originally have belonged to a Stouffer's Hotel.

While Stouffer's sticks mostly to entree-type fare, as does Boston Market, T.G.I. Friday's realized that its appetizers would make great frozen items and quickly moved into the market with a pretty impressive variety. Just about any item on the Friday's appetizer menu can be found in frozen form.

Tony Bourdain has heaped vast quantities of scorn on Friday's, referring to it as "TGI McFunster's" and holding it up as an example of just about everything that's wrong with American restaurant culture. You can decide for yourself whether the criticisms are justified, but they must be doing something right; you can't swing a cat without hitting one of the restaurants. The frozen offerings are equally ubiquitous, available in just about every grocer's freezer.

In this article, we'll compare three of Friday's frozen appetizers to their restaurant analogues. The grocery store versions are roughly half as expensive as the restaurant ones, but how's the flavor?

It should be noted that T.G.I. Friday's refuses to offer nutritional information anywhere on its Web site, and in fact makes no reference to it whatsoever. Thus, the nutritional information for the restaurant items comes from The Daily Plate, an online diet site that has provided high-quality, accurate information on many past occasions.

So, let's start with one of Friday's most popular items, Buffalo wings.

Restaurant version: (3 pieces) 150 calories, 10 grams fat, 90 mg cholesterol, 900 mg sodium, 2 grams carbs.

Frozen version: (3 pieces) 180 calories, 11 grams fat, 95 mg cholesterol, 1,030 mg sodium, 4 grams carbs.

Would that every food comparison was this easy. While the restaurant wings were slightly larger than the frozen ones, the frozen wings had a far better flavor, cooked up crispier and were overall far more pleasing. As frozen wings go, these are some of the very best, and with price factored in they're the clear winner. You'll need to bring your own blue cheese, though.

Next up, mozzarella sticks, one of most common appetizers on the planet.

Based on my research, the restaurant version and frozen version are virtually identical: 1 piece has 110 calories, 6 grams fat, 10 mg cholesterol, 260 mg sodium and 7 grams carbs.

After this test, one is forced to wonder if that basket of yummy fried cheese one orders at the restaurant might come into the restaurant in frozen form, rather than being individually hand-breaded by a highly-skilled kitchen worker who has spent years learning the sacred art of encrusting firm cheese with tasty breading.

Basically, the two products were identical. They both had nicely crisped breading encasing mellow, half-molten cheese with a slightly greasy mouth feel but an otherwise pleasant taste. The frozen version cooked up a tiny bit crisper, but other than that it was a dead heat in terms of quality. Thus, it's price that decides the winner, and that comes down solidly on the side of the frozen version.

Finally, we come to what could easily be called T.G.I. Friday's most iconic appetizer, the loaded potato skins. "Loaded" in this case means topped with bacon and cheddar.

Restaurant version: (3 skins) 660 calories, 42 grams fat, 90 mg cholesterol, 800 mg sodium, 42 grams carbs

Frozen version: (3 skins) 210 calories, 12 grams fat, 20 mg cholesterol, 480 mg sodium, 17 grams carbs.

This was the only one of the three in this comparison to make a solid case for eating at the restaurant. The frozen skins are small, and the toppings have a bad habit of separating from the potatoes in the bag and breaking up. After cooking, the potatoes are somewhat rubbery and the toppings stay rather congealed.

In the restaurant, the story is quite different. The skins on the skins (stay with me, here) were crispy, the inside was tender and the toppings were generous, evenly distributed and melted very well. The restaurant version is just more than double the cost of the grocery version, but well worth it.

So, out of three items tested, only one is sufficiently better in its restaurant form to warrant a trip out. And if you're paying attention to nutrition, you'll notice that the in-restaurant potato skins are far more high-impact than their frozen cousins.