Can You Have Your Intellectual Property and Eat It Too?

Today, New York magazine asks, "Did Marcel From ‘Top Chef’ Really Just Rip Off Wylie Dufresne?"

Marcel Vigneron, the memorably unpopular molecular gastronomist from last year’s Top Chef, can add the staff of wd-50 to the long list of people that can't stand him. The place is agog at the effrontery of Vigneron, since they believe he has brazenly ripped off one of chef Wylie Dufresne’s best-known dishes. By the looks of a feature in the current issue of Wired, Vigneron has created a showpiece dish of a “cyber egg,” the yolk of which is made of carrot-cardamom purée, surrounded by a white of hardened coconut milk. Very interesting, given that almost the exact same dish (minus a garnish of foam and carrot) has been served often at wd-50, is featured on the restaurant’s website, and, we are told by members of the staff, has been eaten by Vigneron at least twice.

I wrote the piece that NYmag.com is referring to, and you can check it out online.

Doing this story, we spent about 90 minutes with Vigneron in the kitchen at Joël Robuchon at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, and he did the three dishes that we wrote about in the magazine, as well as another we didn't touch on. As an aside, he seemed like a pretty decent guy, friendly and smart, and obviously passionate about food.

We've eaten at wd-50 as well -- during the editing process here, we did realize that Marcel's "Cyber Egg" is very, very similar to the one at Dufresne serves. In fairness to Vigneron, he didn't claim to have invented the dish, and we were careful not to say that he did. But we should have noted in the magazine that it seems to be a pretty clear homage, at the very least, to Dufresne's creation.

But there's an interesting issue that's raised here. It's not just that Vigneron is doing a similar dish. A Wired editor just had the same a similar (see the thread in the comments below) dish at Coi here in San Francisco, with no credit given to wd-50 or Dufresne. So that's at least three dishes -- the inventor, and two copies. And who knows how many other joints are slinging their own version of the Cyber Egg.

Can you "own" a dish? When I go home tonight and make Chicken Parmigiana, I'm in debt to some long-lost Italian cook who first came up with the concept, not to mention various versions I've eaten over the years that influence how I make it (The key? Panko to bread the cutlets). When Escoffier essentially codified all of French haute cuisine in 1903, was every chef who made Ris-de-Veau a thief?

It's hard to draw a clear line when it comes to the creative ownership of food. Cooking is such a personal, iterative process that even if you set out to ape, or even steal another dish, it's hard to ever do so completely. Now, should a chef like Vigneron or the folks at Coi give credit where credit is due when they recreate another chef's food? Absolutely. But there may come a time when to do so would be seem silly.

I'm just back from a vacation to Central America where we were served a Molten Chocolate Cake. I remarked to my wife that it's amazing the spread of this dessert -- it seems like every restaurant in the universe serves a version of what started as a mistake. Jean-Georges Vongerichten was experimenting with new desserts in 1987, and pulled a batch of cakes out of the oven before they were done. Trying them, he was intrigued by the contrast in textures between the cooked outer shell and the raw batter in the middle, and he put it on his menu. Now, you can find it everywhere, and no one credits its inventor. (By the way, it could be that Vongerichten didn't even invent it. Jacques Torres, a noted pastry chef, has argued that a similar dish already existed in France.)

Perhaps part of the sense of intellectual theft comes from the relative obscurity of the techniques involved in molecular gastronomy. All cooks are presumed to be able to saute, roast, steam, and poach. But working with agar and sodium alginate and isomalt is still pretty cutting edge stuff. People like Dufresne and Ferran Adria and Grant Achatz are literally creating new techniques all the time, and the reliance on these techniques make similar dishes seem all the more like copying.

Shortly after I wrote about Achatz and Alinea for Wired, a chef at an Australian restaurant called Interlude was found offering versions of many of Alinea's dishes (as well as dishes from other restaurants, including wd-50). The most telling thing posted in the discussion was from Nick Kokonas, Achatz's partner at Alinea:

The problem in this case is, for Alinea, not an economic one or a legal one. I don't personally believe that we have anything to gain economically, nor do I think we have any sort of legal case. Even if we had one, we would not pursue it.

What is at stake is another issue. A chef at Alinea said to me a few days ago, "The thing that bothers me the most, is that if a diner went to Interlude first and then dined at Alinea, that diner would think that we were copying him."