Is there even a thing like culinary plagiarism?
Is copying the highest form of flattery, the epitome of laziness, or is it instead the manifestation of a socio-culinary continuum?
This story is also about cuttlefish, but ain’t a fishy story.
Once upon a time, a chef was leading a one-Michelin-star restaurant in a land on the western coast of Europe. In this place, he worked a dish to perfection.
This plate became so famous, that chefs and cooks everywhere started to make their own version. It is quite a simple plate:
One cuttlefish
Sauce to act as a bed for the cuttlefish, presented whole.
Easy?
Only apparently.
The chef who perfected this idea into a collective culinary obsession in Portugal is called João Rodrigues and was for more than ten years the resident chef of Feitoria, a Michelin restaurant nestled within the Altis Belém hotel in Lisbon.
Throughout the time, and accompanied by his resourceful wife, he set a path into Portuguese gastronomy called the Matéria project, a sort of local version of the initial Petrini’s SlowFood where he travelled the country from coast to coast, in search of products and producers, creating a loving showcase where excellence is displayed.
Last year he removed himself from Feitoria, preferring to focus on his and his wife’s Matéria Project, and cooking for a series of events aligned with his philosophy, while he waits for his new restaurant, called Monda, to open its doors somewhere next year.
Cuttlefish and squid are two unmissable ingredients for Portuguese cuisine, and in a very French combination with a butter reduction of some kind, this plate has entered de facto into Portuguese contemporary gastronomy and is to be seen everywhere.
Some copy and some give credit to Rodrigues and call it an homenagem. Some tell you the French or Spanish origin, some others decide they invented that plate anew and that is their own signature dish.
It’s a cuttlefish with butter, after all.
I recently commented to a “foodie” who found this plate somewhere else that this and every plate served in that establishment were endless copies of some other plates. There was not a zilch of originality in anything. Zero invention, just copies of any other “famous” dishes, famous cuttlefish included. I’m talking about the way of plating anything - always a copy, always the same.
The “foodie” curtly said to me that it didn’t matter, the ingredients are the same and so what if the plate looks the same?
He has a point.
The plate is here to stay.
And in multiple formats, even with carabineiro-infused butter.
Because after all, perhaps this plate was already a twist on an existing dish: calamares Malorquina a la ma tequila negra anyone? Looks like a twist on the sole meunére, another archetypical dish that maintains some of the semantics in its various interpretations.
How and when can we say that a plate is a plagiarism of another, how and when we can say like in music that after all, there are but seven notes?
I’m really finding it hard to wrap my head around the issue of “copyright” in gastronomy.
Is there a need for it, or this art is the only art where copying and replicas are not only admitted but secretly anticipated by the users? Imagine a painter selling a fake Picasso, or a musician auto-tuning his song onto Singing in the Rain: we would be not really happy to lash out money for those.
Music covers, however, and paintings inspired by them are a different thing. Is gastronomy the same?
And it is not the only tale I have for you.
This other story is also about fish, but not too fishy.
It is about Red Mullet, a quite delicious and delicate fish which became the epitome of fine, innovative dining in the last years of the past decade.
I ate the below version at Cañabota in Seville one year ago, and I have seen it replicated a lot recently in Spain, and elsewhere.
It is true that, subtly, Andalucia is becoming the pulsating heart of culinary innovation in Spain (wait until the Basque realises it).
But is this really the only way we can serve this fish to amaze our guests?
Between the omnipresent squid with butter and this deep-fried slice of red mullet, I started wondering whether there is a sort of loop in which some gastronomies enter. Like for Marvel comics movies, it seems that even more lately in gastronomy there’s a low propensity for real innovation.
At the same time, the same chefs who “copy” recently innovated food are vehemently arguing sometimes against the heavy presence of the past, of habits and all of that.
Recently I’ve started digging into the history of a special plate, and later after layers I managed to peel back history to…an Assyrian clay tablet where the first recipe of this same dish was collected.
I was mesmerized by this travel in time and space that the recipe I’ve been studying took.
Layers and layers of history: The issue of “who made it first” lost significance as I got increasingly excited about the various shapes and forms this recipe took travelling through spaces and cultures and different ages.
The cult of originality at all costs
I think one of the reasons why this happens is the fact that we have a very twisted relationship.
We, customers, have been drugged with the news.
We just want new new new: new plates new openings new things anything that distracts from the fact that in reality, what we miss is connection.
Connection with a gastronomic purpose, with the past and the future, with the ecosystem and the world.
This is what we should be looking for.
Instead, enslaved by an algorithm that awards stupidity, brevity and everything incessantly new, there’s so little space these days for deeper reflections.
What brings cooks and chefs to copy one specific plate over and over and over again? And what does it mean to gastronomy?
For the first question, I didn’t find an answer yet. For the second, I have a theory.
I think that when a plate becomes so ICONIC that it appears almost everywhere and in any possible settings but as identifiable as it is the cuttlefish we opened our reading with, this means a lot for gastronomy.
Firstly, it means that this plate as is could enter any “classical recipe book” of any sort that comes forth. This is a quintessentially contemporary plate for Portuguese cuisine today and it could be served side by side with the “Ameijoãs à Bulhão Pato” in the pantheon of Portuguese gastronomy.
Secondly, it is a clear demonstration that gastronomy is an evolving art and science. It’s not static and if some plates are sadly disappearing into oblivion, some others are born and grow and flourish.
Lastly, when there’s a plethora of copies of the same dish I think it’s not a question of plagiarism anymore. It’s a matter of diffused knowledge. In some years, there will be chefs who will not even think about the original one. Or some will not even know its story: but the plate will live on.
To illustrate the point, I have two salads for you.
The first on the left is a picture of the Alpine salad on offer in the tasting menu of the (now closed) restaurant by Chef Niederkoefler in Val Badia, taken in 2021. The right one is a picture taken in August 2023 at the beautiful El Molin Restaurant, a creation of Chef Alessandro Gilmozzi.
Some if not most of the ingredients are the same, yet to me, these plates belong to the same gastronomic universe but have completely different semantics.
Niederkoefler presented his salad pure, rinsed and plated with an eye for the composition, almost Flemish in style, and researched the textures through the different vegetables used (green beans, too).
Gilmozzi instead layered this plate with significance: he whipped and emulsionated a frothed mousse made with milk and olive oil, and rested his selection of 18 vegetables and 4 flowers atop. He then proceeded to add droplets of crystallized olive oil for the crunch.
Whilst the Niederkoefler salad remained a green interval, albeit astonishing and pleasurable, full of Alpine flavours, the Gilmozzi salad to me ceased soon to be a salad and transformed, one spoonful at a time, into a dish finalised at the table - in this case, by the eater.
I would thus not classify it as a salad, because the sole act of eating it would cause the different components to merge in a symphony. In fact, Gilmozzi himself calls this plate “olive oil and the mountain”: the focus is the olive oil, the focus is the connection between the Garda lake and its unforgiving olive trees and the spontaneous plants that he can pick short of a Glacier, less than 100 km away from it.
I am still in awe of this plate and all that it represents. Never ever a plate went so straight to my soul.
Twists on the same concepts, but taking extremely different directions on the sensory level, as well as on the semantics of a plate.
Thus, the musing continues…
The topic is interesting, it's actually inspiring the content of my next newsletter (and if not the next next, one in the future, since I'm too much of a mess to guarantee a deadline XD)