Chefs care about their reputation among peers, but they also care about their broader public reputation. In fact, today public renown can be more valuable to a chef than respect from insiders. In recent years leading chefs have increasingly become celebrities; some argue that “being a chef now is like being a rock star.”50 In 2006 the Food Network—an enormously popular channel which on many nights has more viewers than any cable news outlet51—even debuted a show called Chefography, devoted to biographies of famous chefs and food personalities.52 Much of this intense interest in chefs is created and sustained by other television shows devoted to cooking, ranging from competition shows such as Iron Chef and Top Chef to how-to shows such as Secrets of a Restaurant Chef and 30 Minute Meals.
Feeding all of this is a mass culture of food appreciation that is increasingly about consumption of creative food rather than cooking. As food writer Michael Pollan has noted, Americans have a waning interest in actually cooking their own meals. “The historical drift of cooking programs—from a genuine interest in producing food yourself to the spectacle of merely consuming it—surely owes a lot to the decline of cooking in our culture.”53 Indeed, the competition-style cooking shows that air on television are far more popular than the how-to cooking shows and, as a result, are much more likely to air in primetime. Consumers of shows like Top Chef may not cook much themselves. As avid fans, however, they increasingly are educated about gustatory detail and exotica. Learned connoisseurs of eating are in turn more likely to prize creativity when they go out.
In short, wider public interest in the work of chefs is high, and as a result garnering public as well as peer attention is increasingly valuable to chefs. Attention is the route to fame and riches: a lucrative cookbook contract; reviews from critics; a profile in one of the many food-oriented national magazines. Most valuably, public attention is the critical entrée to television. To be sure, this brass ring is grasped only by a precious few. But like many markets characterized by winner-take-all dynamics, the existence of this prize is a powerful inducement to innovate. And having one’s creations widely copied is a testament to one’s influence and creative power. This not only helps explain the equanimity with which many chefs greet copying. It also helps explain the otherwise perplexing level of desire to produce highly risky, innovative food, which may not turn out to be all that tasty and, more important, may not sell well.
A Wall Street Journal article captured these complex incentives well. After noting the work of daring chefs such as Richard Blais of Atlanta—whose creations include such non-crowd-pleasers as tableside-prepared mustard ice cream and raw-lamb meatballs—the Journal opined,
The goal of this edgy fare is not just to shock; these chefs want to create new food that is delicious to eat. But it’s aimed at an audience outside the restaurant, too. The rise of food media—from television’s “Iron Chef” and cooking magazines to a small army of self-styled epicures writing blogs on the Internet—means that a couple of offbeat dishes can win attention that mastery of French culinary technique can’t buy. Restaurants… may flame out, but the chef becomes a celebrity…. It’s no wonder that more young chefs are modeling themselves after stars such as Ferran Adria, the guru of avant-garde cuisine in Spain, and thinking of themselves as artists rather than artisans.54
Whether this dynamic is producing successful restaurants is a separate question: the public’s taste for creativity on their dinner plate may be limited. (Indeed, Richard Blais’s first restaurant flamed out quickly.)* But it unquestionably is producing substantial innovation. In a field where innovation for centuries was seen as incremental at best and undesirable at worst, this is a noteworthy development.
To summarize the argument so far, we have explored three reasons that chefs continue to create even though their central creative work—their recipes and the food they cook from them—can be freely and legally copied:
• Because widespread copying can burnish a chef’s reputation for creativity, which is increasingly valued by diners and the broader public;
• Because copies in the culinary world are necessarily reinterpretations, not exact copies, and hence do not readily compete with originals and may even serve as advertisements for originals;
• And because social norms among skilled chefs restrain the most egregious forms of copying and thereby blunt its impact.
Together, these arguments help to explain why the widespread copying of new dishes is not viewed as much of a threat in the culinary world. Copying in the kitchen has both positive and negative effects, and the balance between the two varies from case to case and chef to chef. But the key point is simply that copying does not inevitably kill creativity, as the conventional wisdom about copyright law assumes. Warren Buffet (supposedly) once said that his investment approach works in practice, but not in theory. The situation here is not so different. We know that copying does not kill creativity among chefs because chefs remain enormously creative even though the rules against copying barely apply to them. But until now, there have been few attempts to explain why, or how, this is possible.
The Open Kitchen
A deeper take on how chefs continue to create in the face of copying begins with a more frontal challenge to the premise that copying is anathema to creativity. Perhaps copying is not, on balance, much of a threat to innovation, but instead a valuable tool to achieve it. To consider this, step back to the basic justification for regulations on copying. As we explained at the outset of this book, monopoly rights in creations are said to be the price we pay to ensure that creations keep coming. As the Supreme Court declared in a famous music case from the 1970s, copyright exists “to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good.”55 The underlying policy behind these rules is forward looking and results oriented.
This does not, however, necessarily entail a focus on preventing copying. The real goal is incentivizing innovation; stopping copying is just a means to that end. If copying does not diminish innovation, it is not a problem in itself. The standard view considers it self-evident that copying is harmful to innovation. The worlds of fashion and food, however, give us substantial reason to doubt that copying is inevitably harmful.
There are other, similar, examples, to which we will soon turn. Probably the best known is open-source software—software designed collaboratively by large groups of (sometimes otherwise unconnected) individuals. Software and food are very different, and we will talk more about open source in the Conclusion to this book. But some of the principles underlying open-source software also have a surprising resonance in cuisine. Chefs often say that culinary change is largely the product not of large inventive leaps, but of collective, incremental processes of innovation. If so, spreading and sharing innovative ideas is essential to creating them. Legal prohibitions on copying may indeed incentivize some creations, as the traditional view of copyright assumes. But by impeding sharing, these restrictions threaten to squelch other creations. That is the big idea behind open source: innovation is better served through open collaboration and unimpeded propagation and use than via enforcement of property rights.
This dynamic might also explain why creativity in the kitchen continues to flourish in the face of extensive copying. In short, perhaps copying is not the problem, but instead is part of the solution. Freedom to copy enables chefs to learn from one another, and thereby to keep incrementally improving their offerings.
Indeed, in their “Statement on the ‘New Cookery,’” famously inventive chefs Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal, and Thomas Keller declared that “culinary traditions are collective, cumulative inventions, a heritage created by hundreds of generations of cooks.”56 If they are correct, the application of standard rules of copyright to dishes and recipes would create more problems than it might solve. Not only would chefs have legal costs to bear—protecting their erstwhile innovations while defending themselves against (perhaps frivolous) claims of copying. They would also face new barriers to their engagement in the centuries-old �
��collective, cumulative” process that Adria, Keller, and Blumenthal salute.
That process has successfully produced a world of great food. And it is hard to see how food could be much more creative than it already is. Like fashion design, culinary creation is not a problem to be fixed. It is instead a window on an important and overlooked understanding of innovation.
CONCLUSION: THE CREATIVE COCKTAIL, OR WHY DRINKS MAY TELL US MORE ABOUT DINNER
Step down into Crif Dogs, a tiny, unassuming hot dog spot on busy St. Mark’s Place in New York City, and you may notice—if it is after 7 PM or so—a small knot of slightly anxious people clustered by a vintage pay phone on the wall to your left. If you pick up the phone, a woman will answer and a hidden opening will appear. Beyond the opening you may glimpse the dim confines of the modern-day speakeasy known as PDT (short for “Please Don’t Tell”). If you don’t have a reservation you probably will have to wait an hour or more for entrance—the hostess will even take your number and call you when your seat is ready. But once inside you’ll be glad you did. PDT serves some of the best cocktails in New York, a famously besotted city where serious bars compete to attract serious drinkers.
Part of PDT’s appeal is obviously its retro-speakeasy vibe and its dark interior filled with stuffed squirrels and other bizarre decor.* But equally important are the excellent cocktails served there. Like a lot of new bars in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco, PDT serves impeccably made and innovative drinks. PDT and its brethren combine two important trends in 21st-century bar culture: secrecy and creativity.
The secrecy part—the unmarked doors, the fake phones—harks back to the Prohibition era, but without the risk of arrest. The creativity part is obviously what interests us in this book. Bars like PDT (and today there are many) certainly serve their share of simple martinis and Manhattans. But they also offer some pretty creative cocktails, many of which feature unusual and handcrafted bitters, carefully sourced and shaped ice and freshly infused elixirs of various kinds. Put together in unusual ways, the fine ingredients and meticulous mixing make for excellent and interesting drinking.
Indeed, like cuisine, it is fair to say we are living in a golden age of cocktails. And as a result, many of the same questions that we raised in this chapter about cuisine apply to cocktails. Like great dishes, great drinks can be very innovative—more so than many people may realize. Consider a few examples. In Los Angeles, the Tar Pit serves the Prude’s Demise, made with overproof rum, kumquats, kaffir lime leaves, black pepper agave syrup, velvet falernum (a kind of tropical flavoring), and lime juice. Similarly, Death & Co. in New York serves a Cortado: two kinds of rum, coffee-bean infused vermouth, white crème de cacao, demarara sugar, angostura bitters, and mole bitters. Aviary in Chicago makes a Hot Chocolate with tequila and Fernet Branca that involves smoking milk over a burning cigar. At the now-closed Tailor in New York City, cocktail empresario Eben Freeman offered “solid” cocktails, including a Ramos Gin Fizz marshmallow and “White Russian Breakfast Cereal”—cereal soaked in Kahlua, half and half, and vodka, then dehydrated and served in a small bowl.*
Even in lesser known drinking meccas, like Charlottesville, Virginia, the business of high-end cocktails is booming. Charlottesville’s Blue Light Grill makes many of its own ingredients, including house-made tonic. One drink recently on offer at the Blue Light featured a mix of bourbon and sugar syrup painstakingly infused with the flavor of expensive tobacco. The goal, according to the bartender-innovator, was to capture the taste of whisky and cigarettes without the need to light up. Not every innovative cocktail is a success—some, indeed, are quite difficult to swallow. Yet, in their creativity and care these drinks push the envelope well beyond the world of the frozen margarita or Long Island iced tea.
Like great and inventive dishes, great and inventive drinks can and often are copied by others, sometimes as overt homage but often simply because they are great, and people want to drink them. For some, creative cocktails are the chief draw not only in bars but also in restaurants. Indeed, as the Pulitzer prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold argued with regard to Los Angeles, “In some of the best restaurants in town now, the bartender may be as well-known as the chef and even more creative.”57 Molecular mixology and molecular gastronomy often blur. At Bazaar, the celebrated Los Angeles restaurant of Spanish chef Jose Andres, his dirty martinis are served with a spherified olive—olive oil and olive essence in a gel-like robe—and his mojitos are poured over a kind of cotton candy. The afore-mentioned Aviary, a spinoff from the acclaimed Alinea restaurant in Chicago, even dispenses with a bar, instead making drinks in an open kitchen.
Can creative cocktails be protected from copying? Recipes, as we discussed, can be freely copied. Nonetheless, some are trying to use other legal rules to protect their liquid creations. In 2010, Painkiller, a tiki bar in New York City, was threatened with a cease and desist letter by the makers of Pusser’s rum, who claimed a trademark in the Painkiller cocktail (dark rum, orange juice, pineapple juice, and coconut cream, topped with nutmeg).58 Gosling’s Black Seal rum, based in Bermuda, likewise claims a trademark in the Dark ‘n Stormy, a simple mix of rum and ginger beer.
“We defend that trademark vigorously, which is a very time-consuming and expensive thing,” said Malcolm Gosling Jr., whose family owns Gosling’s rum. “That’s a valuable asset that we need to protect.” Not all see it the same way, as an article in the New York Times explained,
But a trademark-protected drink—especially one as storied and neoclassically cool as a Dark ‘n’ Stormy—seems anathema to the current bartending practice of putting creative individual spins on time-tested drinks. Drinks like this one undergo something like a wiki process: a tweak here, a substitution there, and the drink is reimagined.59
For the most part, bartenders tend not to keep their inventions secret. Like chefs, they often freely pass their recipes and techniques on to others. Still, there is some resistance to the culture of copying that exists in the high-end cocktail world. Eben Freeman, the originator of the solid cocktail at Tailor, also claims creation over a technique called “fat-washing,” which involves mixing a melted fat with a spirit of some kind and then chilling it, so the fat rises to the top and can be skimmed off, leaving only the flavor.60 “In no other creative business can you so easily identify money attached to your creative property,” said Freeman in a recent interview. “There is an implied commerce to our intellectual property. Yet we have less protection than anyone else.”61 However hyperbolic this last claim, it is true that copying is common in the mixology world. Yet as Freeman himself illustrates, there is substantial innovation taking place.
In short, cocktails look a lot like cuisine: creativity absent copyright, coupled to vibrant competition. And many of the same factors that we argue shape innovation in the kitchen apply across the restaurant in the bar.
First, cocktails are hand-crafted, often right in the front of the customer, and technique and ingredients matter substantially. So like food, an individual drink is not reliably the same from maker to maker, and may even vary at the same bar in the same night. This is especially true of today’s often rococo cocktail creations, which demand precision and often arcane inputs.
Second, cocktails, even more than cuisine, are a performance as much as a product. A bar, fundamentally, is at least as much about atmosphere as it is about actual drinking. So the copyist of a particular cocktail isn’t necessarily going to compete with the originator. Of course, if the bar itself were copied—the entire look and feel of the place—the copyist would be vulnerable to a trade dress lawsuit, just as one restaurant cannot copy the entire look and feel of another.
Third, bartenders, Eben Freeman notwithstanding, tend to believe in sharing as an ethos—perhaps even more so than chefs. Take the crucial issue of technique. For years, well before the classic cocktail craze took off in the United States, Japanese bartenders had been meticulously recreating American drinks. One of the most famous i
s Kazuo Ueda, who invented the “Hard Shake” method of mixing drinks. Though it appears to have been taken down now, until recently Ueda operated a Web site called Cocktail Academy, where he explained the Hard Shake as well as his overall philosophy of drink making (and philosophy is not as much of a stretch as it may seem—the site included entries such as “The Way as an Art of Cocktail,” referencing the classic Japanese Cha-do, or “Way of Tea”).
Ueda’s willingness to share the Hard Shake technique* certainly doesn’t prove that bartenders are an especially collaborative group. But taken in context, it is consistent with virtually everything else we found about cocktail (and culinary) culture. Openness, sharing, and innovation are generally seen as going hand in hand, and not as inevitable antagonists.
Kazuo Ueda also underscores another area of tangency between bartenders and chefs. Like celebrity chefs, who have many, and growing, options to make money outside of the kitchen, celebrity bartenders can work as consultants and even teach others in special bartending academies. Ueda himself came to New York City in 2010 for a special appearance in which he explained (through an interpreter) his approach to bartending and of course taught the assembled guests his famed Hard Shake. Tickets were $675. As this suggests, an ethos of openness and sharing doesn’t preclude making some money along the way.
3
COMEDY VIGILANTES
One day Milton Berle and Henny Youngman were listening to Joey Bishop
tell a particularly funny gag. “Gee, I wish I said that,” Berle whispered.
“Don’t worry, Milton, [said Youngman,] you will.”1
The Knockoff Economy Page 11