“It’s a classic American marriage between food and law.”

The NYTimes is the forum for poor, poor Rebecca Charles. You see, she owns this restaurant, Pearl Oyster Bar in the West Village, and her former sous-chef Ed McFarland, the slimy bastard, opened up Ed's Lobster Bar in SoHo. You own a restaurant, your sous-chef finally gets enough experience to start his own dilly-o across town, so this article is about the little fete Charles threw for McFarland to help him celebrate his gastronomical upward mobility, right?

Of course not, this is New York City (voice-in those old Pace salsa commercials). Charles slapped McFarland with an intellectual property suit, claiming that the menu, decor, and otherwise in Ed's Lobster Bar is the same as Pearl Oyster Bar, down to "the packets of oyster crackers placed at each table setting." Charles also makes the dubious statement that "That restaurant [the Pearl Oyster Bar] is me.” All of the sudden the dispute swings from restaurant parrotry to cloning the owner against her will: I'll have the stem cells and cole slaw, please.

Ms. Charles needs to realize two things. First, if other restaurants start doing what she's doing, it's likely a sign that demand for her product is increasing. If the whole seafood bar market is expanding, wouldn't you want other restaurants to be similar to yours? Sure, there'll be people who go to the other place instead of yours, but vice versa too: Franchises require uniformity among restaurants so you don't have to think about whether you want the Big Mac from Jim's McDonalds or the chicken fingers from Susie's. There is value in uniformity throughout a set of restaurants for everyone involved, as long as the quality is maintained. If Charles were suing McFarland for making a shitty copy of her restaurant, I'd be more sympathetic.

Moreover, good luck proving damages. If I'm McFarland's defense attorney, I'm gonna make sure Charles factors in that she'll be getting business from people who like McFarland, over time, as much as the other way around (think Coase: initial distribution of entitlements becomes irrelevant over time with good information and transaction costs). In the restaurant business, convenience (transaction costs, how long does it take me to get there) is a huge selling point. If McFarland can show that more people who live around where he is take visits to Charles' side of town than vice versa, he can argue that she's actually getting more pecuniary benefit from his restaurant than she is from hers.

I think the moral of the story is that someone needs to call a whambulance for Ms. Charles: We know, you feel used and abused by your former sous-chef. He staged (plated?) a coup d'etat and is now oystering all over town on his own. About the best she could do is to quote the honorable Mr. Lebowski ("You're Mr. Lebowski, I'm the dude"): "The bums will always lose!"