in its weekend edition the wSJ had a piece (paid site) about copycat chefs, taking ideas for dishes from other restaurants and offering it on their own menus.

it gives the example of dishes from WD-50 in NYC (which i really like for its innovative courses), and how a chef in australia basically copied a dish. the chef admitted to copying, but said he is often telling his customers that the dishes were inspired by certain american chefs.

egullet.com did more research on the issue and found that indeed many restaurants are copying dishes from other restaurants (not only the ingredients, but also the style of serving, as can be seen in the picture).

this prompted certain chefs to look into IP rights, patents and other means of legal protection for their recipes, which i think is ridiculous, and also does not make business sense. to submit a patent the chef will probably need to spend over $15K, and by the time he gets the patent (2-3 years later), probably already spent over $50K. and with the constant innovations in the kitchen, what used to be hip and novel 2 years ago, may be irrelevant today. plus lets assume the chef get the patent, then he need to go look for people who violated the patent, and take them to court?.. sounds like a waste of time and money.

i think it is perfectly ok to copy a dish you saw somewhere (you still need to reverse engineer the actual recipe), and that when you do copy a dish just add in the menu "inspired by/based on <_____> "