DID A ‘TOP CHEF’ CONTESTANT STEAL HIS WINNING DISH? THE ANSWER ISN’T SO SIMPLE.
A fight is playing out across Instagram and Reddit threads and spreading into local restaurant kitchens: A New York chef is accusing one of her former employees — now on Season 21 of Bravo’s Top Chef — for allegedly copying her dish on the show. But the reality of who owns a recipe — the cooks that created it or the restaurant that served it — is far from cut-and-dry.
Danny Garcia — now executive chef of James Kent’s Saga Hospitality Group — has been accused by chef Victoria Blamey, his former boss at the now-closed Tribeca restaurant Mena, of allegedly copying a recipe from her from when he worked for her. That very dish, or at least a variation of it, won him an elimination challenge on this season of Top Chef, which takes place in Wisconsin.
Blamey — who is now head chef of Roberta’s tasting menu revival, Blanca — opened Mena for a five-month stretch in 2022, with a menu that pulled from her Chilean roots. The decision to close was made by its Walker Hotel ownership. Before Mena, she steered the kitchen at the revived historic Chumley’s (now the location of the controversial Frog Club). She went on to work as executive chef at another New York classic, Gotham Bar and Grill, replacing Alfred Portale, who had been the chef there for 30 years and now has a namesake restaurant and is the head chef for Sartiano’s in the Mercer Hotel.
Danny Garcia is executive chef at Saga Hospitality Group, whose anchor restaurant Saga has two Michelin stars; he is on track to run the kitchen at the group’s next restaurant at 360 Park Avenue South. Garcia had formerly cooked for Crown Shy, Belon in Hong Kong, and at Mena.
The dish Garcia cooked on Top Chef, scallop chou farci, is one that was on the menu of Blamey’s acclaimed restaurant in 2022; she notes on Instagram. It is a variation on a classic French dish, stuffed cabbage. Garcia’s version, made with yuzu kosho foam, was declared “technical” and “luscious” by host Kristen Kish. Eater has reached out to Garcia; contestants are not allowed to talk about the season in progress.
“The dish was created while I opened Mena by me, between 2021-2022,” Blamey posted on Instagram Stories this week. “To have someone copy the exact same dish and win Top Chef is not only a lack of moral and professionalism but a sad demonstration how this person has no creative guts of his own. Surprise that @bravotopchef doesn’t do their research better.” Below the photo, it lists scallop, sea lettuce, and vin jaune, with the dish in a ceramic bowl.
While Blamey notes that the dish is hers, in a 2022 interview about Mena on Resy that discusses the chou farci, she specifically points to the collaborative process in creating the dish, and that it’s not entirely an invention, but rather a take on a classic chou farci, which traditionally is made with pork or duck, and in the Mena version, swaps in seafood and seaweed instead.
In the Resy piece, Blamey uses “we” rather than “I” in discussing the creation of the dish, and cites Garcia’s role in helping create it: “This one is funny. We were working on a monkfish for the longest time, wrapped in seaweed with this scallop mousse. We kept going back thinking that we liked it, but we were not extremely happy with it. So, I said ‘You know what? What if we start working on the mousse itself?’ Our executive sous chef Daniel Garcia has this really good recipe, so I said, ‘What if we make it around the mousse?’
She continues: “We incorporate dried scallops in that mousse so we can have more of a flavor of scallop. That’s a full-on Chinatown inspiration [from the dried scallop]. Then, we add some lime zest just for aroma and perfume. The layers of the sea lettuce are punched out, so you have to build it, and wrap it in Savoy cabbage. You have to steam that. The sauce is a vin jaune that we make into a foam so it’s airier and lighter. We do a pretty simple basic recipe, using some dashi. We finish with succulents to give you texture on the bite. And then we put a tiny bit of caviar on that since the umami flavor is really beautiful.”
After the episode aired, Garcia posted a chou farci image on Instagram, with a caption that reads “Scallop Chou Farci, Yuzu Kosho, Vin Jaune,” seemingly alluding to his winning dish. However, the image, which tags the photographer, was taken by Evan Sung and posted in April 2022, with a caption that congratulates Blamey and the Mena team for its New York Times review.
It is difficult to “own” a recipe, an intellectual property lawyer confirmed to Eater. Recipe books can be copyrighted, but that only protects the creativity in the selection and compilation of recipes the author chose, not the individual recipes. And the courts don’t necessarily consider food intellectual property. “The U.S. government refuses to issue copyrights to recipes, which it describes as ‘a mere listing of ingredients or contents, or a simple set of directions,’” Eater reported in 2019.
On Instagram Stories, Blamey shared a DM from a user, who calls out evidence that it was a “collaborative dish,” adding “for you to pretend that chefs don’t seek inspiration from one another, far and wide, as artistic expression and homage is deaf to your profession,” to which Blamey comments, “Collaboration LOL ‘I should be happy,’” followed by, “Oof Women LOL,” and “Oh Some Women.”
Eater has reached out to Blamey for comment.
2024-05-03T17:24:39Z dg43tfdfdgfd