when chefs leave restaurants

[stovetop]

Thank you for some insight on copyright laws, it was very enlightening.

There is an easy solution though, if the ideas come from your head, budy can copy your recipes but he can not steel them, they are part of you or your staff.

My advice is still to be the Executive chef and work the front end, have a solid manager waiter/ sommelier; your chef is working within your coverage, you or the restaurant are front and center, the recipes are coming from the point of view as coming from the restaurant, not necessarily the big chef that has all the media attention, so when he or she bails, wipes out your computer and steals all you staff, you crash and burn.

Keep the big ego chef on a short leash; he is managing your kitchen not running your dam restaurant.

steve

[lala]

Also, copyright or not, it's still bad form not to give credit where credit is due in cookbooks.

Damn right! Or indeed, where possible even in a restaurant setting, supposing one were really honorable. But I think it's pretty clear ex hypothesi that that is not a salient attribute of the people lala has described!

In that particular case, this 'chef' had indeed credited her minions in the book proofs. However, these credits dissappeared between the proof and the final product. I guess the little people were just too little to be credited in public...

[Pan]

You might want to make the piccolo a separate deal, though.

Yeah. And hire me.

Flute. Piccolo. Is there a woodwind instrument you don't play?

I play only flute/recorder family instruments (well, I have theory teacher-level piano-playing skills).

Incidentally, I can remember as a child (maybe in 7th grade) hearing a violist play a Bach cello suite one octave higher than written. I still remember his last name, but I'd rather not mention it. My father asked whether I liked the performance. I said I had. He said that it was a great performance, but it wasn't his: It was a complete copy of Casals' famous recording, in every detail. The point being that musicians are free to attempt exact copies of other musicians' performances, but risk being found out by audience members. I suppose it's more or less the same for a chef who copies another chef's recipes without crediting the source.

[Suzanne F]

EDIT: NDA = Non-Disclosure Agreement - but actually I think in that context it would have to be something more like a Non-Compete Clause. Do restaurants have 'em?

Not sure about restaurants, but I had to sign one when I took a job as Kitchen Manager for a food manufacturer. Not that I'd ever want to use their recipes, virtually all of which were developed by people who had no idea of flavor. So it's been easy keeping my word. Besides, they made me surrender all my disks when I left.

[Moopheus]

Could they really claim exclusive rights to its use? I still think you'd have to be bound by a pretty stringent work-for-hire NDA for that to stand - but maybe it actually is implicit in the working relationship.

That's how a lot of commercial food companies operate, but a trade secret is only good as long as you can actually keep it a secret. There's no Federal law protecting them, and state laws vary. I'd think in a restaurant kitchen it'd be pretty hard to enforce.

[chefboy2160]

To awnser the origional question , you take the best , leave the rest ,and of course never look back . If there are any legal ramifications than I guess a whole lot of us

chefs are going to be filling up the courtrooms for a while . Jeeze , this thread has given me itchy feet ............................

[cdh]

Even if not copyrighted, couldn't recipes be considered intellectual property?

No. Doesn't work that way.

As said before in the thread, there are 4 flavors of IP-

--copyrights, which protect original creative expression (and boat hulls), but not facts;

--trademarks, which protect the commercial value in the association of a mark with a particular source of goods and prevent the unfair competition of allowing somebody to confuse the consumer as to the source of the product;

--patents, which only apply to novel, non-obvious and useful inventions; and

--trade secrets, which require a high level of vigilance on the part of the secret owner, and are totally unprotected from reverse engineering.

Recipes could only fit in under the trade secret flavor, and doing so would require a proprietor or chef to make everybody to whom he teaches the recipe (or who could come to know the recipe) sign a nondisclosure/noncompete agreement. That is the best way that the law could protect a creative genius in the kitchen, but if the competition come in, sit down and order all of the secret dishes, and figure out the tricks, then they're free to go forth and replicate them all they want.

Edited April 20, 2004 by cdh (log)

[balmagowry]

Actually, putting it into historical perspective, the authors of published recipes are lucky to have as much copyright protection as they do. I'll never forget the day I discovered, while researching some 18th-c recipes, that two similar versions of something were indeed not just similar but identical in every respect. Looking into it more closely I found as many as three well-known and popular cookbooks with large chunks of identical text, including carefully-reproduced errors. And well before that (15th/16th c), Platina built his reputation on De Honesta Voluptate et Valetudine, most of which was flagrantly lifted from Maestro Martino. Yet I don't know of any instances in which the original authors fought for their copyrights (admittedly I haven't studied that question in depth, but not to have run across any anecdotal evidence at all is surprising enough) - at least, not beyond occasionally hinting that so-and-so is a charlatan and a disgrace to good cookery. Apparently intellectual property ain't what it used to be; it's a hell of a lot more.

Edited April 20, 2004 by balmagowry (log)

[cdh]

Well... if you want to get historical, copyright didn't come into existence in the Common Law world until Queen Anne's reign... 1730's, if I'm recalling correctly. No copyrights at all before that.

Patents, on the other hand, were handed out at royal whim, and conferred monopolies on all sorts of stuff on favored individuals and entities. So modern patents are a lot less than they were historically, while copyrights are a hell of a lot more.

Trademarks have stayed relatively stable over time, except very recently, when the concept of dilution of famous marks came into fashion, and then got codified.