Fat Guy

One meal there is useful for cultural literacy. I would just suggest that if you're going to establish a baseline you should try some of the Italian-American chains that aren't so terrible. Macaroni Grill and Maggiano's have done a nice job distilling the Little Italy restaurant into a replicable chain format.

Olive Garden really is as bad as everybody says it is. Just about the only palatable items are the salad and breadsticks. It's all downhill from there. It doesn't have to be this way. Olive Garden, for whatever reason -- presumably market research supports the strategy -- chooses to serve poor-quality, artificial-tasting food that is too sweet, too salty and not good. Chains like Macaroni Grill do a much more respectable job of imitating the standard-issue Little Italy Italian-American restaurant. When traveling, I have no trouble getting a better-than-average meal at Macaroni Grill. But getting a good meal at Olive Garden, even in Times Square, is an impossibility.

Robert from IcingMagic is actually a member... http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=41641 ...if someone sends him a message he might be inspired to post some advice.

Chef Robin has now told another newspaper, this time Australia's Sunday Age, that "At no time did I try and claim that I invented any of the dishes." I think most folks posting here were ready and remain eager to move on from the specifics of Chef Robin's case to the general issues involved, but he keeps pulling us back. It's hard to feel sorry for the guy when he maintains that position. Certainly, he is not the victim here.

Also from the department of FWIW, the Lonely Planet guide to New York City (2004 edition) says on page 21: "Schmear. A small amount of cream cheese; used when ordering at a bagel counter, as in, 'I'll have a sesame bagel with a schmear.'"

Of no particular help, Harduf's English-Yiddish/Yiddish-English dictionary says shin-mem-yud-reish means "smear."

FWIW, Barron's/Epicurious says: There's no discussion of schmear in Rosten, but I'll check a couple of other Yiddish texts and report back if I find anything.

Nathan, for the record, I don't think you're hounding. I do, however, think you're failing to see the forest for the trees. It's not plagiarism to say "you're failing to see the forest for the trees." It's just use of common language. Now if I wrote "But it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation" without attributing Melville... I agree that Wylie is being honest. But I also think he's wrong (you too): he's buying into the nihilist notion that all inspiration is plagiarism. It isn't. Certainly, there are gray areas. Certainly, proving a case of culinary plagiarism is quite difficult. That's why the egregious acts described herein above are so important: they establish such a clear case that we can set the red herring of gray areas aside for the moment and focus on the important issues. Maybe someone else will do something that falls into a gray area. That's not what happened here. I also wonder if Wylie, Grant, et al., will continue to be so forgiving in light of the private apologies they received now that the apologist is telling newspapers "At no time did I try and claim that I invented any of the dishes that I had experienced in the US and recreated at Interlude."

We've heard from chefs. For example, Richard Blais: And we've heard from restaurateurs. For example, Nick Kokonas: Again, plagiarism is a concept in ethics that applies to all creative endeavors. It's not limited to academia, nor is it limited to the written word.

The Guardian's code of ethics is much less equivocal on this point than the article it ran on the subject: "Plagiarism. Staff must not reproduce other people’s material without attribution. The source of published material obtained from another organisation should be acknowledged including quotes taken from other newspaper articles. Bylines should be carried only on material that is substantially the work of the bylined journalist." http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guar...25/code2005.pdf

And here I was thinking it was about ethics. While each discipline needs to define the boundaries of plagiarism for itself, it is not correct to say it exists only in academia. The prohibition of plagiarism -- "to steal and pass off the ideas or words of another as one's own" (Merriam-Webster) -- is a fundamental ethical precept in most any creative discipline that takes itself seriously, be it literature (not just academic literature but also, of course, novels and journalism), art or music. Too many people are too hung up on intellectual property law issues and tangible harms, which, while interesting, are not relevant to the ethical transgression of plagiarism -- the theft of ideas and the fraudulent representation of those ideas as original. Now, Chef Robin -- who seems hell bent on earning quotes around the word chef -- has told the Guardian: "At no time did I try and claim that I invented any of the dishes that I had experienced in the US and recreated at Interlude." It's hard to think of a more disingenuous characterization of the facts, and it's hard to think of a more reluctant apology than: "I guess I did something bad and have to pay the punishment - but it happens a lot more regularly than people realise." Wylie Dufresne's statement is also unfortunate: "We all plagiarise all the time. All we can do is stand on the shoulders of the people before us. It's a grey area. None of us is completely innocent." This misunderstanding of plagiarism, which I thought we dealt with here upthread, equates the conduct of an artist inspired by other artists with the conduct of a thief. Inspiration is not plagiarism. Tricking people into calling all inspiration plagiarism is the oldest trick in the plagiarist's book of weaseling out of responsibility. And it is an insult to all the hard-working, honest chefs who try to create and be original to say "We all plagiarise all the time." I don't think Wylie Dufresne is a plagiarist in any way, shape or form, but even if he believes he plagiarizes "all the time" he should speak only for himself. Wylie Dufresne is a victim here, and his forgiveness is a testament to his generosity of spirit, but here he goes too far.

To me there's a difference between a bagel with a schmear and a bagel with cream cheese. A schmear involves less cream cheese. "Would you like a bagel with cream cheese?" "Just a schmear."

On Google's book search there are a couple of references to "balsamic vinegar" from 1950s cooking and travel books. For example, in Take Two & Butter 'Em While They're Hot: Heirloom Recipes Kitchen Wisdom, by Barbara Swell, there are instructions for making a tomato salad, including "Sprinkle with shreds of fresh basil and drizzle Balsamic vinegar or Italian dressing on top."

I agree, Sean. It was necessary, I think, to document and discuss the specific instance in order to establish a basis for a larger conversation about the important issues at play here. It seems we're now well into the general phase of the conversation and can leave the specifics behind so long as they remain settled. I certainly plan to focus on the big picture. No need for gratuitous and repetitive bashing.

Having had the actual Peninsula Grill coconut cake four times, and hearing the reports of how the cake comes out when prepared according to the home recipe, I've got to say I'm suspicious of the recipe that Bon Appetit printed. The Peninsula folks have been famously guarded about that recipe, not wanting to enable commercial reproduction (they sell the cakes by mail at an exorbitant price). Certainly, the cake as served in the restaurant (and the mail order version, which is about the same) is anything but dry.

To me the most challenging open technical question with respect to attribution in cuisine has to do with the appropriate form and scope of the attribution. When we're dealing with words, it's easy: we have footnotes, endnotes, inline citations, acknowledgments and various other devices. Usually a writer works within the rules set forth by a journal or other publisher. When dining, however, the written word is peripheral. Plenty of times the specific dishes in a degustation aren't even written down. Much of the communication in restaurants occurs through the waitstaff, and it's not exactly easy to control what servers say -- not to mention sometimes you don't want to hear it. I could certainly understand being served the occasional copycat dish without explanation -- the logistics of culinary attribution in the dining room dictate that even a chef who makes a good-faith effort to attribute is going to fail sometimes. Now, when you get into published recipes, interviews, etc., it becomes a lot simpler. You have the written and spoken word available to you. Still, specificity of attribution is an open question. For example, is it sufficient to say in a several prominent interviews "We serve a lot of dishes that are inspired by El Bulli" or is it necessary to say that about every dish every time? Certainly, once you do the former you're no longer a plagiarist. I imagine if all chefs simply spoke forthrightly about their influences when asked, there wouldn't be a need for much more.

I think the better analogy is to music. It's okay to say a song is inspired by the Rolling Stones, even though the band's name is a trademark.

You're probably right, but ultimately I don't think we should care whether people have the understanding. It's still wrong.

To be clear, the Daily Gullet, in an exercise of the fair use doctrine governing commentary, opinion and reporting, chose to print the photographs without permission from Interlude. Although the eGullet Society is dedicated to protecting intellectual property, the team felt that its journalistic obligations to bring the information to light were paramount in this instance, especially given the nature of the underlying issues.

Plagiarism was a topic that came up around our house often when I was growing up, not because I lived in a commune of plagiarists but because my father was considered one of the leading commentators on the subject. If you do plagiarism research, it only takes about ten seconds to stumble across a citation to "Plagiary," by Peter Shaw, in the American Scholar (1982). One of his main contentions is that plagiarism has a psychological dimension -- that it is similar to kleptomania in that the plagiarist and the kleptomaniac steal when they don't have to. There's little doubt in my mind that the chef who turned out the Alinea and WD-50 copies depicted in the Daily Gullet piece above could just have easily, or with a minimum of additional effort, created dishes that were not such exact copies. And publishing those copies online for all the world to see? It strikes me as a cry for help. To quote my late father, this time writing in Illinois Issues in 1991: (emphasis added)

I think to most folks familiar with the academic literature on plagiarism, this will seem an open and shut case. The only possible open issue I can find here revolves around the specific standards -- if any -- used in the culinary world. A given discipline or art does have some ability to set standards for itself. But while it is important to examine those standards, no set of standards can cover for an outright misrepresentation of another person's ideas as one's own. I think failing to take this incident seriously would be a failure to take the culinary arts seriously. The culinary inferiority complex needs to end. The relevant practitioners need to acknowledge that cuisine can be art -- that it can represent the height of the human spirit and intellect -- before there can be serious talk of standards.

Since when does such a question depend on getting caught or on how many people find out?

I think there's a much sharper focus on invention in avant-garde cuisine than in the case of either of the dishes you've referenced. For one thing, I'm not at all certain that Jean-Georges and Nobu are the inventors of those dishes. A pastry chef could tell us if it was Georges Blanc or a predecessor, and I believe there's at least a claim that Tojo served the miso cod dish first. However, that's not really the point. Each of those dishes represents such a gradual evolution that it's not so clearly marked as an invention. The molten-center chocolate cake is a small variation on various other chocolate pastries. When you get into this avant-garde stuff, though, you're dealing with some pretty radical breaks: a whole new way of making noodles, the anti-griddle, etc. That's a big part of why, I think, the question of copying has been mostly in the background until now. There was grumbling about unoriginal chefs, but there wasn't the same kind of invention we have now.

Plagiarism is representing someone else's work as your own. I don't see how this was ever an accepted practice in cuisine. When a chef cooks Peche Melba, it's not an attempt to pass off Peche Melba as the chef's own work. The dish is part of what in writing would be called common knowledge. Certainly, there are some examples that come close to the line. The evolution of a dish, and the exact point at which it passes from being the invention of one chef to being common knowledge, is not the easiest thing in the world to track. But some of these things are no brainers. On the one hand, molten-center chocolate cake has passed into common knowledge. It's not plagiarism to make it, the chef who serves it isn't really representing it as his own -- though maybe he'll give it a little twist of some sort -- and only seriously inexperienced diners will assume it's the chef's invention. On the other hand, these dishes from Alinea and WD-50 are quite unique and have certainly not passed into common knowledge such that it would be good form to serve them without attribution.

That may be part of the argument, but plagiarism is an issue primarily of ethics. You can copy the works of Shakespeare, which are in the public domain, without violating any intellectual property laws, but if you claim them as your own you're a plagiarist.