A few weeks ago, during my trip to New York, I had a late dinner at the Pearl Oyster Bar down in Greenwich Village. Some serious people in the city's food world had recommended it to me and it lived up to the hype.
I ate deep fried oysters with tartare sauce, steamed clams with pulled butter and a lobster roll, the most shamelessly promiscuous use for that luxury ingredient ever devised: prime lobster meat, bound in a mayo sauce, and served on a sweet soft white roll.
What I loved about it was that it reminded me of one of my favourite restaurants - the Swan Oyster Depot in San Francisco - and it captured something of the seafood shacks which are such a feature of America's coastal life.
Now comes the intriguing news that the chef owner at Pearl, Rebecca Charles, is suing a former employee for setting up his own restaurant, Ed's Lobster Bar, which she says is a complete rip off of hers.
The merits of the case will be decided by the courts but it raises questions about to what degree both a restaurant and dishes served in them can be copyrighted. Charles, for instance, has said that she is a fan of the Swan Oyster Depot. And that in turn references a particular kind of homegrown fish restaurant.
And at Pearl they serve not original creations but classic dishes, although, one assumes, these are prepared to a particular recipe. These include a Caesar salad which has its own lineage going back many decades. A debate around this very subject was sparked, a few months back, by an article in Food and Wine magazine about the efforts of a chef in Chicago, Homaro Cantu of Moto, to copyright some of his more exotic creations, like a flavoured edible paper. Conventional wisdom has always been that recipes can't be copyrighted, though as discussed on food site Megnut there are some who think that's the way to go in a quickly developing gastronomic world.
The issue where Pearl is concerned goes far deeper - into whether former employees have a responsibility not to take with them too much of what has been learned. That one will keep the lawyers in gainful employment. From this greedy eater's point of view, though, more places serving fabulous lobster rolls can only be a good thing.
