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Since it opened in December, West Village restaurant the Marrow has received much attention, with the press calling the eatery “original” and its dishes “magnificent” and “irresistible.” But when one critic heaped praise on a roasted bone marrow dish topped with sea urchin, others in the food world were quick to cry foul.
“Uni and bone marrow is strictly a rip-off of the great @ericripert,” novelist and wine writer Jay McInerney sniped on Twitter, pointing out that chef Eric Ripert had recently put a marrow-filled bone topped with uni [sea urchin] on the menu at his restaurant Le Bernardin.
Ripert responded to the matter graciously but humorously, tweeting: “being copied is also a compliment :)”
When asked about the matter, the Marrow’s chef Harold Dieterle sent a diplomatic e-mail to The Post, stating: “When I create a dish, I naturally think of it as my own,” but “I’m well-aware that pairing combinations, even wildly creative ones, are rarely without culinary precedent.”
Although this is just the latest alleged duplicate dish to make the news, it’s not the only one — and it’s certainly not the most scandalous. Chefs all over the city are claiming that their ideas are being stolen, and they’re taking action.
Chef David Burke has gone so far as to patent and trademark his culinary inventions. He recently got a patent on a special method of dry-aging beef in a room lined with blocks of Himalayan salt. Although he hasn’t started chasing down the copycats, he says they’re out there. “In Ireland, in Australia . . . in Brooklyn,” he says. “I know there’s people copying it all over the world.”
Some restaurateurs are also now asking staffers to sign work agreements, in a bid to safeguard their ideas from unfaithful employees.
Jimmy Haber of ESquared Hospitality, whose 24 restaurants include BLT Steak, makes all of his chefs sign contracts so everyone’s clear about who owns what. After a lawsuit with a former chef dragged on for three years, he says he’s gotten an “expensive education.”
“If I have a software company, and I hire a software engineer who is creating algorithms, the company owns those algorithms,” Haber says. “It really is no different for a chef in a larger company.”
Lawyers are starting to agree, saying the food world is finally waking up to the value of its ideas in the way that fashion designers are now battling knockoff merchants.
Rebecca Charles, the owner/chef of Pearl Oyster Bar in the West Village, fought an alleged copycat five years ago. In 2008, she sued her former sous chef, Ed McFarland, after he left to open another restaurant, Ed’s Lobster Bar. She claimed it was just like her place — right down to the oyster crackers and wainscoting.
“It wasn’t a case of one, two or three recipes, it was a whole menu, exact platings, with a restaurant that looked 99 percent the same,” Charles says.
After her mother had a stroke and her legal fees added up, Charles was unable to continue with the case. She settled for undisclosed terms in 2008. (McFarland declined to comment.)
More cases like this one are going to start cropping up, says Judith Roth, an attorney concentrating in intellectual property at Schiff Hardin, who represented Charles.
This is partly due to the changing nature of the restaurant industry, with its big financiers trying to make a quick buck. The code of chef conduct — where you don’t bite the hand that feeds you (or trains you) — has eroded. Social media is also to blame: Anyone who goes to a restaurant can snap a picture of their dish and post it online, making it easily available for millions to copy.
Roth says “you can’t copyright a recipe,” but it is possible to trademark the look and feel of an establishment, as many chain restaurants do.
Alex Raij says she invented the uni panini at her restaurant El Quinto Pino — only to have it “stolen” by big-time chef Ken Oringer at his Boston tapas joint Toro.
“Nobody made an uni panini before we did,” she claims, adding that Oringer had been at her restaurants. “It just seems so petty, but it mostly seems petty to people whose idea it wasn’t. It’s hard to have an idea, it gets harder.”
Raij says she doesn’t want to sue people — she just wants credit where it’s due.
“My issue is not people borrowing or taking so much [as] it’s just frustrating when the press has such [a] short memory,” she says.
(For the record, Oringer doesn’t cop to copying her uni panini. He says that when he opened another restaurant called Clio more than 15 years ago, he served a small uni sandwich “inspired by sea urchin dishes I had in Italy.”)
Chef Burke claims to have invented the cake pop 15 years ago, an idea that has since been borrowed by everyone from Starbucks to wedding caterers. In the past, Burke has explored trademarks on some of his other ideas, including “pastrami salmon,” but he’s honest about the limitations of protecting culinary ideas. “We were the pioneers of putting cake on a stick,” he says, but he doesn’t bear a grudge against the imitators. “It’s not really annoying, it’s flattering to a certain degree.”
And Amanda Cohen, the chef at East Village vegetarian spot Dirt Candy, was proud when she cleverly made a sherbert out of the root vegetable watermelon radish and paired it with watermelon-flavored gummies. A year later, that same pairing appeared on the menu at Blanca, a top-rated restaurant in Bushwick, Brooklyn, but she doesn’t believe she was copied.
“I have faith in other chefs,” Cohen says. “We’re all in this together.”
Even Ripert, who was singled out as the victim of a restaurant rip-off, admits to being a bit of a copycat himself. He says he got the idea for his uni marrow dish from a caviar marrow dish by the great Spanish master Ferran Adrià.
“Seriously, in food,” Ripert says, “everybody has to be inspired by something.”
