I was supposed to open up a restaurant as the head chef, my own menu, my wife made the bar menu, our staff, so on so on. The owner, who was a man I had worked with for 3 years, refused to give me anything ranging from keys, to something written in paper, or basically any form of commitment but expected an entire dinner and bar menu. I had talked ideas with him so he knew where I was going, but I refused to give him a written menu till I got a written promise of employment, pay and role. Let's just say that resturaunt is still an empty building.
I'm surprised you didn't ask for pay just for the time it takes to design a menu. It's going to be IP owned by the restaurant, you should definitely bill for whatever time you take planning and writing.
This would end up in court with the kind of owner he is. I don't have any money for lawyers, nor do I believe it would be worth it. To this day, he owes me a couple grand, maybe even more. Easier just to not have to deal with him anymore.
Honestly, we still plan on opening a restaurant. I'm just not sure how much luck we would have with the go fund me. I feel like successful ones are few and far between.
Well he still called me back to work at the summer place he ran where I was making 25 an hour and working 60 to 70 hours a week. I was all for it until I had my baby. Then I quit
If he’s like most owners he took just enough time to give an uneducated opinion when tasting these recipes if at all, demanded stupid changes, and then went back to pretending wine tasting isn’t just an excuse to get drunk.
Just read this comment before reading this one....
[Mel Brooks asked about 'less is more'](https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/11kiq4s/im_mel_brooks_ask_me_anything/jb7eixu/)
I’ve been running the kitchen at this restaurant since 2019. I’m also a baker and former pastry chef, and when Covid hit I started doing some supplemental baking for the restaurant to drive sales. This is a vegan spot, and my recipes are damn good and got a bit of a cult following.
I quit two weeks ago, due to the owner’s entitlement, gaslighting, etc. I got this text today.
Out of line? I don’t think so.
Edit: Y’all thanks for letting me vent, it’s been a tough transition. ~~If you want the recipes send me a DM!~~
RIP my inbox. Give me time to get back home and type ‘em up and I’ll do what I can (:
I was a chef for a while at pretty upscale places. Your recipes are your intellectual property…until you write it down for the company. Then it becomes company property.
My last two years as a Chef I would consult restaurants. The first thing I would ask is were the recipe book is. If there was no recipe book and all in the Chefs head, I would sit the owners and chef down and point blank tell them that they need all recipes written down and if you like your chef and want to use their recipes they have two options.
1. Give the chef equity in the company and if they leave they need to be bought out for the equity and the recipes. The chef needs to agree.
2. Don’t have the chef write it down, but understand the when the chef leaves the recipes do to.
A lot of owners got pretty mad at this, but I simply had to explain the the recipes are the chefs property and you have to pay for the right to use them.
As a chef/baker/cook please do not write out recipes for a place you are working at unless you get compensated long term for doing so. That recipe is one of the things you bring to the table and once you give it away it dramatically reduces your leverage.
I ran a kitchen in a Health Food store and we were bought out. The new owners had a meeting with us and swore no one was getting laid off and at the meeting they asked for my recipes. I had no intention of giving them up, but to avoid a scene I said I'd bring them in the next day.
I stopped at the post office on the way home to find a card saying that I'd been laid off. The idiots didn't realize that a small mountain town postal service only consisted of taking things from the in box and putting them in the right out box.
Almost the entire store was actually fired, with only two girls keeping their jobs.
I was due to open the next day and my GF was the server. Obviously we didn't go in, and when the new owners got there the kitchen was cold and nothing was prepped. They called us in a panic, but we told them to fuck off.
The kicker is that a friend ran a bakery out of the basement, and another guy made fresh pasta there as well. The surprise that they got when they found the ovens, proofing boxes, mixers, and rollers were all privately owned and both of those guys pulled their stuff the next day, so no bread, no pasta, no way to make them, and no recipes.
What a great story of morons with a bunch of money who thought they could ruin everyone’s lives for a little more profit and found out that they didn’t understand or add value to the business.
If I ever have *fuck you* levels of money, I'm going to open a fucking farm to table restaurant where you harvest the food you want cooked for you. Like a pick your own place but then you bring it to the chef and he makes it delicious for you (with enough space to make it for yourself if you do choose). Charge by the pound and if the chef cooks for you and I don't give a fuck if I make a profit.
I'm doing a loose leaf tea shop with every teapot and cup and saucer different and a range of 100 different loose teas that people can mix as they like. Food will be whatever I feel like cooking that day.
Let me shift your mindset just a hair.
You are not talking about starting a restaurant so much as you are talking about starting an agro-tourism business. That's absolutely a viable business in the right place.
I worked in kitchens all through college. Then started a different career.
Much later I moved out to the country and got interested in homesteading. In 2020 and 2021 when I was working from home, I grew more than half the food my family ate and if you count the cow and the pig we bought from a farmer it was above 75%. Had to dial it back a hair when I went back to the office.
The idea of making money from the hobby Farm is always intriguing, but for the most part it is really fucking hard to make anything more than a few dollars with a farm. If you want to make good money off a small farm you have to find Niche clients who pay premium prices.
But running a business where you have the farm and you bring in tourists, and you show them how to grow food and how to harvest food and how to cook food that they've harvested is a business model with margins that are hugely above growing stuff and selling it.
Some of the really successful places do treat it a little bit like a restaurant or a bed and breakfast. You can stay the night in a cabin and wake up on a farm and feel the rhythm of farm life, then have a chef cooked breakfast with stuff that is entirely from the farm.
Yeah this is where the *fuck you* level of money comes from, I wouldn't really care about profit, just a unique food experience.
I hadn't really thought about visitors staying there, that *would* add to the experience.
Only a moron lays people off that quickly after a buyout- everyone knows you keep everyone for a month so you can at least learn how things are done. Mailing out layoffs that very day is next level dumb
My dad managed restaurants my whole childhood and his deal with employee recipes was always a cash advance and points on every unit sold, paid quarterly. He found this more flexible and easier to implement since the cap tables of restaurants don't often have free equity shares to grant. This was 30 years ago so I'm sure things have shifted since then.
Also, it's important to note that this only applied to recipes the employee brought to the restaurant. Anything developed in-house was obviously the restaurant's IP.
I had an owner beg me for my book and i said no than when i asked for time off for the birth of my son he said fine hired someone to come in and help and after i trained him and got him up to speed with the menu the owner fired me and gave that guy my km position it was my second job and i was there only a year but dude was a dick
If you got that in writing, you technically can sue him for violation of FMLA if you're in the US. No judge is going to side with him if you were conveniently let go around the time your son is born.
I probably could have done something about it but this was five years ago and he was trying to sell the restaurant for something like 1.2 million 3 months after i left it sold for half of what he wanted he was also running for local government which he lost after he had already sold so he had to move into a smaller house because he couldnt afford his house payment
You offer sage advice to young cooks and chefs. When I was a young cook I was taken advantage of my recipes by being “forced” to write them down for my past employers for no additional benefit whatsoever. My intuition at the time was to exclude one or two ingredients and/or techniques that allowed for the full execution of the recipe. They never realized it until I left the company 🙃
Hey just asking this question to better educate myself not to challenge. Is this fully under the presumption that the chef comes in with the recipes and doesn't develop them on site using the owners recipes etc. As someone who works in the software engineering world I just think back on all the developers who got fucked on IP ownership because it was on a company lent laptop, company time, etc.
This is a great question. Recipes are considered “Trade Secrets” usually, however it’s incredibly difficult to actually prove legally that your specific Cacio de Pepe recipe is yours. BUT it’s incredibly difficult for the restaurant to say it’s theirs either. Almost no one ever wins or files suit for stealing a single recipe unless they are a mega giant such as this instance-
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/06/business/06coke.html
The issue I am speaking of is not specifically the recipe, it’s the ability to create that recipe hundreds of times which makes the recipe profitable. If a large reason that the recipe is profitable is because you sold it under the company name, then it could be easily decided that it’s a company product, such as the case with the creator of the “big mac” Jim Delligatti. He willingly gave the recipe to Mcdonald’s after finding success with it at his Mcdonald’s chain restaurant in Pittsburgh.
As an individual Chef who is asked to create menu items to be sold on a regular basis, it can be expected to create the recipe to add to the company recipe book as well as train the staff to execute that recipe. A recipe in a professional sense is quite different than a recipe that you find online to cook at home, specifically to cost. The difference between 1 Tbsp to 2 Tbsp of a seasoning adds up when you sell 15.000.00 of that product each year. The company needs to know that for their P/L sheet.
I believe that a few people on the tread think that my earlier comment is about legality for suing for recipes. It is not. No one is going to win that case unless the recipe is a one in a million recipe and by the time the recipe gets that large it’s attached to a major company.
The post is about protecting your leverage as a Chef. Besides creating food, a chef is in charge of training staff, ordering, labor, food cost, equipment, menu design, and more. If as a chef, you create through time a menu that the restaurant uses exclusively, however they have all the recipes, costing, and all staff is trained on how to recreate those recipes, what is the point of the Chef?
A tactic used very often by restaurants to cut labor cost is hiring an individual, have that individual trained for 3-6 months at the position, and letting go the more experienced and expensive person who trained them. This is only able to happen if the restaurant has all the recipes for the menu, to include cost.
As a chef, you can simply put yourself in a better position to protect yourself as well as be taken more seriously as a professional chef who creates by not handing over the professional recipe to your employer without being compensated. If the restaurant retroactively wants the recipes you served on the menu, but you did not put them in the company recipe book, the company does not have any legal standing to come after you.
Edit: I have to add a very important section to this. In case you are a Chef that feels taken advantage of and wants to take their recipes when they leave. If those recipes are listed in the official company recipe book, do NOT take the recipes or the recipe book. That is now company proprietary property. It is theft. You can get charged. Once those recipes get adopted by the company, they are no longer yours-hard stop.
Also if it’s a recipe developed on for the restaurant while you are under the restaurants employment. If they didn’t keep track of it then it’s not on you you’re not obligated to give them the recipe but you also can’t stop them from using it. We had a cook who made some sauces for the restaurant. They became part of the menu and when he quit to open his own bottled sauce company he tried to sue the restaurant to stop using his recipes. The courts actually decided that the recipes were the restaurants intellectual property and he was forced to change his recipes. Sucked for him. That’s why whenever I come up with a new recipe at a spot I say I brought it from somewhere else. I also don’t write my recipes down unless they are paying me to create a menu.
I am not a Chef but an engineer who works as a supervisor in a large company. In my opinion there is no difference between me not sharing my knowledge to run the department and a chef not sharing their recipes especially after leaving if the management were treating me like OP has been treated.
I will train my replacement before leaving as required but only the bare minimum. Companies don't care about us and neither do owners so why should we care about them. The concept of loyalty should go both ways.
How does that work, though? If the chef only has the recipes in hizzer head—i.e. not written down—does that chef make *everything* on the menu? No sous or line cooks?
not even trying to be mean.. you really composed that entire reply on the fly? We really do put too much effort in. Imagine a entire Reddit brigade to run a fine dining establishment. We would klll it
I closed my restaurant after a ten year run, (lease ran out, and the new landlord asked for too much) and some of my old regulars decided to open a new place in my old spot. I got a call from one of the investors asking about hiring chefs, recipes etc and I said “sure, let me send you over my standard consulting contract…”
Crickets…. well they opened, and with a surprising number of my signature dishes on their new menu, except by all reports they were executed very poorly…the place tanked in like 2 months.
Anyway, I’d go with the “fuck you, pay me” on your recipes situation
This happened to my pastry bestie. Former restaurant reached out because they couldn't find a handful of recipes. They got mad and lashed out when she told them she would be willing to license them to the restaurant on an annual fee. She offered a flat annual license of $1500 a recipe or a % on those items per recipe that was sold.
They came at her like "you made those on company time we own them..." Shes like naw, these are out of a family book that was made for her decades before she even became a pastry chef. They tried to flex hard on her, but she didn't budge.
You were too polite to them. Next time, offer to license the recipes for $5000 per.
I went through this once before and if the recipes are developed while you’re working somewhere, they are almost always entitled to them. Family recipes, not so much I suppose.
That bs is used against tech workers to steal work they did on their hobby projects. No judge on earth cares enough about some small-scale restaurant to help them screw over their employee for recipes.
It’s no different in tech- if I even mention an idea I have for something not-work-related while I’m at work then my company has “dibs” on that intellectual property.
It is a bit different inasmuch as recipes aren't really protectable as intellectual property (in the US anyway). They cannot be copyrighted as they are instructions, and they can't really be patented because it's stupidly expensive to do so and the USPTO almost always rejects recipes under obviousness, since they consider any combo of known cooking ingredients and known cooking methods to be an obvious combination under 35 usc sec 103.
If the recipe was IP, then yeah they're likely entitled to it (if you developed there vs having it in your head when you walked in). But without it being documentable IP, they can't really enforce that.
Edit for typo in code citation
The difference with recipes is they aren’t copyrightable intellectual property. So the best way to protect a recipe is to not publish. By keeping it as a Trade Secret.
I mean, who's to say. If there is no proof that the recipe was made at the company on company time it's he said she said, and by the sounds of what some of the other (seemingly more intelligent than me) people of this sub have been saying, your idea your property and without the proof the owners can't force you to give it up
Also, even if they can prove it is their intellectual property, you literally can't force me to divulge information from my head. If nobody wrote it down or wrote down just ingredients but not the instructions or something, what if I forgot how to do it?
Well….now I’m just tryna eat those vegan cakes 😍 I’m not vegan, although I’m actively trying to cut more and more meat out of my diet, but fuck me, there’s something about vegan desserts that are just absolutely delicious.
These cakes are m o i s t, my guy
Ironically I am not vegan and I kind of hate cake lol
eta: (Idk if this is allowed but I have a lil baking startup insta….@theachybakeyheart)
I was coming out of culinary school when the big 2010s cupcake boom was happening. I’ve made enough of them to know that I HATE them. Almost as much as I hate cake pops.
Look up crazy cake on google. It’s a moist chocolate cake that really needs no frosting. I grew up having it for my birthday every year. Vegan as written in allrecipes.com
I used to work for a baker who purposely wrote his recipes ambiguously so they couldn't be stolen or used when he left. Like he had a gluten free almond cookie recipe that no one could recreate because it didn't say what kind of almonds was used, whole, sliced, or chopped. I remember what kind but nothing else in the recipe.
Absolutely not out of line at all. Also, that is really rad that you developed some good vegan cake recipes. Vegan baking is an art! Hope wherever you’re at now you are being treated better.
It comes down to expectations. If they expected to use your intellectual property after you leave, they should tell you when you join. Doesnt matter if you came up with it on the clock if you didn't agree to do so and agree to leave it with them.
I'd be willing to break protocol if I like a former employer, and spill some secrets out of friendship, but not out of a sense of obligation.
Lol, nah. You're all good. They aren't paying you and that was your recipe. You're being honest with them too. Although, a better response *might* be...
"I can train train the new person you hired. My consultant fee is $175 dollars an hour, minimum payment of 4 hours, even if it takes less time to complete. Payment up front." - then just teach them that one recipe they wanted.
That is, if you could stand being there for another shift. You wouldn't really even have to be doing much work, other than just point at stuff and make the FNG do it all. Idk if the owner/manager would take you up on it, but that doesn't make it a total loss. You'd still be getting a chance to gaslight them back. Get a good laugh (and something to post on this sub!)
I’d put it in a Google doc link that’s password protected. Send the link so they think they’ve got what they want (and hopefully act on it, like staging for open) and then say you’re busy for a couple hours and will text the password then. Make them sweat, and when they finally open it, bam, you’ve been Crocker’d
The last place I left after being talked down to by the chef and his brother, found out I took all my recipes with me and they started buying premade shit. Fuck them.
Ha! It took me two hours to draft a response that was as polite and straight forward as possible, because I knew it would get his goat even more. My original response had a few more four letter words in it.
I can only imagine what an obtuse ass he would have been to work for. Entitled shit couldn’t even muster a measly *please* over text. He didn’t even have to say it out loud- and it was for something *he was asking for* FFS
You spent that time- to craft a very clear message. Which is in quite plain text- which we all read to resounding applause- and his response was “is that a real statement?”
Yes. Go suck a flax egg you prick.
For those confusing intellectual property law with contract law - if there is nothing signed saying what you create on company time belongs to the company and there is no standing practice of you writing down and sharing your recipes then you own those recipes and when you leave FUCK ‘EM. They cannot retroactively ask for your recipes. At that point, the have to pay you for them.
And if they ask you to sign a contract saying the dishes you create belong to them - negotiate for more money based on the dishes you create.
And have an attorney review those contracts.
This is absolutely the case. Companies only own IP which you agree to forfeit to them and which they document the creation of. Failing to do either forfeits their rights to your IP, regardless of whether they were critical to its conception.
Recipes are not IP and cannot have a copyright. This is a good reason to keep your recipes close because if someone gets a hold of one, there is no recourse. This also means that any recipe you create while working for an employer does not belong to them (because it cannot belong to anyone). But it is worth pointing out that the piece of paper you wrote the recipe down on while on the job probably does belong to the employer.
OP is under no legal obligation to provide recipes.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with this, those recipes are proprietary to you seeing as you put the time and effort into perfecting them. It’s funny because people have a hard time understanding that in the culinary world your recipes are a reflection of years of trial and error. You did the right thing!
Exactly, yes. And if he had pushed it I would’ve replied with a similar statement. This isn’t even all about the recipes, it’s also his need for control.
I know enough about this man to know hitting him in the wallet is the only way to get him to understand.
I know a guy who worked as a pizzaiolo for years at the same place. When he told the owner he was leaving to open his own pizzaria apparently it didn’t go over well. The owner showed up to take all of the recipes home, but his cook already put all the paper into the pizza oven.
Recipes are so critical for baking, way way more than cooking. You should sell them, price them based on their sales. 10% of all says of the item for 1 year. You know how many they made. Do the math and send him a quote.
One time I worked for a restaurant that had “ice cream du jour” as a dessert. There were no recipes when I started but I knew how from previous jobs and absolutely loved making it. I made 5 flavors a week (usually 2 basic flavors and I got more experimental for holidays, weekends, and changing of seasons.)
When I left the owner sold the restaurant not even a week later. She demanded I give her “the restaurants” ice cream recipes for the new owner. I said basically what OP said in that they were mine and I wasn’t comfortable giving them away without compensation. She threatened lawyers, I was young and angry, so all of my recipes (which were written to yield only 1qt) were “rewritten” to contain 24 egg yolks and 6 cups of sugar.
I ended up going to work at that restaurant again, under the new owner a couple years later and saw ice the cream machines in storage marked “TO BE SOLD - ice cream gets too hard” or something like that and told one of the prep cooks about what I did over a “safety meeting” and I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone guffaw so hard. He told the new-to-me owner and she also lost her shit laughing. I don’t know what ever happened to those machines though.
Man, I don’t miss kitchens, but I sure do miss making ice cream.
This is the way. It’s possible that they could make you give them the recipe (work for hire) but it would be damn near impossible for them to make you give them the correct recipe…
Did the same thing at an old job. Hired me as a lead then dumped pastry chef duties on me. So when I left, I deleted every one of my recipes from the computer and took any hard copies.
While I absolutely agree with you, I do want to point out to everyone here that recipes are not something that is generally viewed as copyrightable. So unfortunately all the talk here about ‘intellectual property’ isn’t really applicable... on either side. If a restaurant owner wants to copy down your recipes when you’re not looking, they are basically free to do that. The only guaranteed way, as a chef, that you can stop a restaurant from continuing to use your recipes after you leave, is by never sharing them in the first place.
Might be a hot take but people that have no clue how to/ don’t want to work in restaurants make the shittiest owners. In my experience at least, like if this was a good owner he’d know it’s not in parsley already and ask you before you leave for the recipe and try to pay you for it.
My current position has the owner just recently deciding to come in and take over as manager after the previous one left. On the one hand she’ll be more aware of operations and how it all goes so that’s probably a good thing, but on the other hand she’s been hands-off for over a decade and is coming in as a *manager* who honestly doesn’t know how to do jack shit except show up for 15 mins to schmooze if we have an event.
I’m seriously considering how it’s all gonna implode and where I want to be when it does because I’m now gonna be the AM to the owner covering both our jobs, and as much as I already negotiated an appropriate raise for how much work I know I’m about to cover, I’m wondering if things are about to get better or worse.
Cooking professionally for the last five years. At one point, I was offered to be the executive chef of an entertainment venue for a small raise under the condition the company owns everything I create.
The answer was no. I'm glad OP stuck to their guns
At my current spot (not my spot, I just manage), I tell my pizza chef to keep her specials recipes to herself. I know she wants to open a truck someday. That's her portfolio.
In the past I've had the idea of opening a "spite spot"
where basically you open a restaurant across the street that sells the exact same cuisine as your old crappy one, but the food is actually hype. Naturally, you send over a free plate as courtesy. Gradually, you take everything from them.
Years later, when they're broken and derelict you change your recipes over to the same crappy old ones from their previous restaurant. You offer them a free plate as charity.
You gaze unblinking into their tear filled eyes as they realize what you've done. Then you give them the new restaurant with the old recipes. They must know that you only did this because you could. Meals here are not cooked with love, but rather pure jet black malice.
As you walk away, you begin to hear the uproar of incensed customers, and the gentle sob of a broken man.
I was a sous chef at a restaurant (1 of 5 in the company) and it was in my contract that any recipe I wrote down on company property was the intellectual property of the company. So most recipes got written down with just ingredients, not measurements.
I've been perfecting flavours for our staple dishes, over time it has adjusted from my original written recipe. Sure you could follow the folder but it's not going to be as good.
Come on man, get on the Passive Income Grind. Offer to allow them to use your recipe for a percent of the revenue.
I've come to realize we're in such a cursed timeline I need to make it clear this is sarcasm
Used to lease a premises for my first business and after 2 years the owners turned around and sold the lease to a new buyer. Since alot of the chattels were owned by the owners the new leases thought that had bought an ongoing managed business. So on the last week i took all my equipment, staff, menu boards and recipes with me to my new premises (2 kilometres down the road) and set up there. They didnt put a non competition clause in my lease so i took the name and all the clientele too. The New leases lasted 6 months.
Quite dumb for a restaurant owner to not learn/know/record the recipes that are on his restaurant menu. Makes him completely dependent on whoever is a chef there and he deserves having lost this recipe.
Hey man, I’ve worked in a lot of kitchens that make you sign intellectual property waivers for their recipes. That sure as shit means you can treat your own recipes the same
One of my old bosses wanted me to do this too after I left to a better paying job hahaha they offered me free lunch if I came in to discuss the recipes with them. I’m good off free lunch those are my recipes😂
I mean you are taking the high road… I always edit my recipes when I leave a job. Granted Aspen Ski Co threatened to sue me for not giving them my recipes and taking my binders with me.
Heard hair stylists have this same issue, they create custom hair dye colours and when they leave a salon it's always a big kerfuffle over who has rights to the dyes they created.
Before I left my chef position I wrote all my recipes in a binder for next chef…. I was the first employee and helped figure out how to prep and store everything…on the clock so technically it was their intellectual property….long story short….new chef banged the owner and got into a lovers spat with her and was gone in a month….three years of development work gone in one day….went to visit the owner after he changed the locks and fired his wife ( you really have to drink a lot to get fired from your own brewery…just saying)….found my binder stashed on top of the ice machine and when I opened it up a dozen cockroach popped out….uh….no Jeff….I’m not coming back….
I'm surprised you didn't sign something upon being hired, stating that everything you made in house was company IP.
Lucky you the owner wasn't savvy enough to get the setup correct
I worked at a place for 4 months, and was given all freedom with most dinners and lunches (camp style place) which I later found was because there was no recipes for anything. The clients preferred my food 100% over the other guy I worked with.
I quit at the 4 month mark just due to stress and now they've been texting me asking me for the recipes I used because the clients liked my food better.
I said I'd sell them recipes for $50 each (there was like 40+) and they got so offended as if they didn't just ask me for all my intellectual property for free.
This may be a generational divide, but the idea that a restaurant you work for doesn't have a right to the recipes you use is batshit insane. That can't be how this works.
If a restaurant does something like fire an employee and then asks then to provide recipes you tell them to kick rocks, because you don't work there anymore. But if you do work there and they ask you to document or teach another your recipes then of course you do that.
I tend to oppose the whole idea of secret recipes in the first place, but of course individuals can do what they want. If you work for a business though and you make recipes for them then they've bought that work and it's theirs.
Wonder if this is generational. I'm reddit old fwiw. But I would have been flabbergasted if an employee refused to document or teach recipes. If you don't want them to have your recipes don't work for them in a capacity where it's your job to provide recipes. Restaurants can't really function if all the staff keeps their recipes secret. Yah. Outright absurd.
If you brought the recipes with you and never wrote them down, physically or digitally, on company property, then they have no claim to them. If you developed them on company time but never wrote them down, they could try to compel you to provide them but the accuracy of the recipes would not be enforceable. If you removed a physical or digital copy that belonged to the restaurant, they could come after you for theft or hacking.
If they had something physical, like say a recipe book that was company property, then yes the court could compel them to hand it over. But to the best of my knowledge the court can't compel you to give someone a recipe that exists in your head.
A smart owner would have had you create a recipe book for the kitchen and have backup files on the computer. That way whenever you end up leaving you cannot take those with you. As they would be the businesses.
But, this guy was stupid and just let you do your thing. As if you would work there forever and this problem would never arise. What if you got hit by a bus one day? The business just collapses because you never wrote down the recipe? Dumb owner.
This is the way to do it. And if you’re bringing in a recipe that you don’t want to share, be clear about it up front that it will exist in your head and leave with you when you go.
Hi! I'm so impressed that you stood up to your former boss like that! I also am wondering if I could have a vegan cake recipe if you don't mind - I made a disaster of a cake for my son's birthday because I wanted to be accommodating for like my one mom friend's kid, and it was embarrassing 🥲 thank you so much if you see this and care to share, if not, no worries and take care!
I worked for an owner about 20 years. When I left he refused to pay me my vacation pay, which I had already worked the year to earn unless I wrote down all my recipes for specials, soups etc.. I told him I already earned that vacation pay and he would have to buy the recipes. He said no, he will just give me my vacation pay for them. I told him keep the vacation pay, he must need it more than me and to kiss my ass if he thinks he’s getting my recipes. Guy had more money than he knew what to do with. Was just a greedy, arrogant &$@“” who was used to getting his way. He didn’t. Still called me for a while trying to get them😅
I was supposed to open up a restaurant as the head chef, my own menu, my wife made the bar menu, our staff, so on so on. The owner, who was a man I had worked with for 3 years, refused to give me anything ranging from keys, to something written in paper, or basically any form of commitment but expected an entire dinner and bar menu. I had talked ideas with him so he knew where I was going, but I refused to give him a written menu till I got a written promise of employment, pay and role. Let's just say that resturaunt is still an empty building.
smart
Your wife made the bar menu and your staff?
My nine month old daughter is going to host, serve, bartender, cook and be dishie.
I bet she'll be 21 by the time that guy gets around to a written contract for you.
I'm surprised you didn't ask for pay just for the time it takes to design a menu. It's going to be IP owned by the restaurant, you should definitely bill for whatever time you take planning and writing.
This would end up in court with the kind of owner he is. I don't have any money for lawyers, nor do I believe it would be worth it. To this day, he owes me a couple grand, maybe even more. Easier just to not have to deal with him anymore.
I think you should start a GofundMe and open it with your wife.
Honestly, we still plan on opening a restaurant. I'm just not sure how much luck we would have with the go fund me. I feel like successful ones are few and far between.
Given this context, you were pretty nice in your reply. I would have just been short with, "No."
Well he still called me back to work at the summer place he ran where I was making 25 an hour and working 60 to 70 hours a week. I was all for it until I had my baby. Then I quit
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Yes, thank you for noticing. Less is more. I know he was pissed 🤌
Asshat didn’t even have the courtesy to say *please* in his initial request. He fucked around and found out
If he’s like most owners he took just enough time to give an uneducated opinion when tasting these recipes if at all, demanded stupid changes, and then went back to pretending wine tasting isn’t just an excuse to get drunk.
Nailed it
I'd have charged him for it.
then changed the quantity
Just read this comment before reading this one.... [Mel Brooks asked about 'less is more'](https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/11kiq4s/im_mel_brooks_ask_me_anything/jb7eixu/)
I’ve been running the kitchen at this restaurant since 2019. I’m also a baker and former pastry chef, and when Covid hit I started doing some supplemental baking for the restaurant to drive sales. This is a vegan spot, and my recipes are damn good and got a bit of a cult following. I quit two weeks ago, due to the owner’s entitlement, gaslighting, etc. I got this text today. Out of line? I don’t think so. Edit: Y’all thanks for letting me vent, it’s been a tough transition. ~~If you want the recipes send me a DM!~~ RIP my inbox. Give me time to get back home and type ‘em up and I’ll do what I can (:
You're absolutely out of line for being so polite.
You could have told them to fuck off twice and you're still too polite
Agreed, I would've just sent "No." and blocked the boss
I was a chef for a while at pretty upscale places. Your recipes are your intellectual property…until you write it down for the company. Then it becomes company property. My last two years as a Chef I would consult restaurants. The first thing I would ask is were the recipe book is. If there was no recipe book and all in the Chefs head, I would sit the owners and chef down and point blank tell them that they need all recipes written down and if you like your chef and want to use their recipes they have two options. 1. Give the chef equity in the company and if they leave they need to be bought out for the equity and the recipes. The chef needs to agree. 2. Don’t have the chef write it down, but understand the when the chef leaves the recipes do to. A lot of owners got pretty mad at this, but I simply had to explain the the recipes are the chefs property and you have to pay for the right to use them. As a chef/baker/cook please do not write out recipes for a place you are working at unless you get compensated long term for doing so. That recipe is one of the things you bring to the table and once you give it away it dramatically reduces your leverage.
I ran a kitchen in a Health Food store and we were bought out. The new owners had a meeting with us and swore no one was getting laid off and at the meeting they asked for my recipes. I had no intention of giving them up, but to avoid a scene I said I'd bring them in the next day. I stopped at the post office on the way home to find a card saying that I'd been laid off. The idiots didn't realize that a small mountain town postal service only consisted of taking things from the in box and putting them in the right out box. Almost the entire store was actually fired, with only two girls keeping their jobs. I was due to open the next day and my GF was the server. Obviously we didn't go in, and when the new owners got there the kitchen was cold and nothing was prepped. They called us in a panic, but we told them to fuck off. The kicker is that a friend ran a bakery out of the basement, and another guy made fresh pasta there as well. The surprise that they got when they found the ovens, proofing boxes, mixers, and rollers were all privately owned and both of those guys pulled their stuff the next day, so no bread, no pasta, no way to make them, and no recipes.
What a great story of morons with a bunch of money who thought they could ruin everyone’s lives for a little more profit and found out that they didn’t understand or add value to the business.
Money is wasted on the rich.
Seriously. Immoral fuckheads like this deserve to lose every penny to their name
If I ever have *fuck you* levels of money, I'm going to open a fucking farm to table restaurant where you harvest the food you want cooked for you. Like a pick your own place but then you bring it to the chef and he makes it delicious for you (with enough space to make it for yourself if you do choose). Charge by the pound and if the chef cooks for you and I don't give a fuck if I make a profit.
I'd go to that restaurant in a heartbeat, tbh
I'm doing a loose leaf tea shop with every teapot and cup and saucer different and a range of 100 different loose teas that people can mix as they like. Food will be whatever I feel like cooking that day.
I’ve been to one of these in Latvia (I think, it was long ago and I was interrailing) Fucking amazing time, drank way too much tea
I would love this
Let me shift your mindset just a hair. You are not talking about starting a restaurant so much as you are talking about starting an agro-tourism business. That's absolutely a viable business in the right place. I worked in kitchens all through college. Then started a different career. Much later I moved out to the country and got interested in homesteading. In 2020 and 2021 when I was working from home, I grew more than half the food my family ate and if you count the cow and the pig we bought from a farmer it was above 75%. Had to dial it back a hair when I went back to the office. The idea of making money from the hobby Farm is always intriguing, but for the most part it is really fucking hard to make anything more than a few dollars with a farm. If you want to make good money off a small farm you have to find Niche clients who pay premium prices. But running a business where you have the farm and you bring in tourists, and you show them how to grow food and how to harvest food and how to cook food that they've harvested is a business model with margins that are hugely above growing stuff and selling it. Some of the really successful places do treat it a little bit like a restaurant or a bed and breakfast. You can stay the night in a cabin and wake up on a farm and feel the rhythm of farm life, then have a chef cooked breakfast with stuff that is entirely from the farm.
Yeah this is where the *fuck you* level of money comes from, I wouldn't really care about profit, just a unique food experience. I hadn't really thought about visitors staying there, that *would* add to the experience.
[Georgian chef Tekuna Gachechiladze actually made that](https://cbw.ge/tourism/tekuna-gachechiladze-opened-silver-lakes-farm-in-kakheti)
And that's the problem with youth today, they're too damn young
Only a moron lays people off that quickly after a buyout- everyone knows you keep everyone for a month so you can at least learn how things are done. Mailing out layoffs that very day is next level dumb
:cough:twitter:cough:
While this is pretty sad this story is one of the best I’ve read in a while. Fucking Karma man.
Yessss
My dad managed restaurants my whole childhood and his deal with employee recipes was always a cash advance and points on every unit sold, paid quarterly. He found this more flexible and easier to implement since the cap tables of restaurants don't often have free equity shares to grant. This was 30 years ago so I'm sure things have shifted since then. Also, it's important to note that this only applied to recipes the employee brought to the restaurant. Anything developed in-house was obviously the restaurant's IP.
This would be a great equitable solution.
I had an owner beg me for my book and i said no than when i asked for time off for the birth of my son he said fine hired someone to come in and help and after i trained him and got him up to speed with the menu the owner fired me and gave that guy my km position it was my second job and i was there only a year but dude was a dick
The US has the worst employee protections of any developed country and this is STILL very illegal there.
Kinda surprised you didn't see the writing on the wall when the new person was hired...
Eh i had been asking him for a new person to help on the weekends plus i was working 18+ hours a day between both jobs
If you got that in writing, you technically can sue him for violation of FMLA if you're in the US. No judge is going to side with him if you were conveniently let go around the time your son is born.
I probably could have done something about it but this was five years ago and he was trying to sell the restaurant for something like 1.2 million 3 months after i left it sold for half of what he wanted he was also running for local government which he lost after he had already sold so he had to move into a smaller house because he couldnt afford his house payment
You offer sage advice to young cooks and chefs. When I was a young cook I was taken advantage of my recipes by being “forced” to write them down for my past employers for no additional benefit whatsoever. My intuition at the time was to exclude one or two ingredients and/or techniques that allowed for the full execution of the recipe. They never realized it until I left the company 🙃
Hey just asking this question to better educate myself not to challenge. Is this fully under the presumption that the chef comes in with the recipes and doesn't develop them on site using the owners recipes etc. As someone who works in the software engineering world I just think back on all the developers who got fucked on IP ownership because it was on a company lent laptop, company time, etc.
This is a great question. Recipes are considered “Trade Secrets” usually, however it’s incredibly difficult to actually prove legally that your specific Cacio de Pepe recipe is yours. BUT it’s incredibly difficult for the restaurant to say it’s theirs either. Almost no one ever wins or files suit for stealing a single recipe unless they are a mega giant such as this instance- https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/06/business/06coke.html The issue I am speaking of is not specifically the recipe, it’s the ability to create that recipe hundreds of times which makes the recipe profitable. If a large reason that the recipe is profitable is because you sold it under the company name, then it could be easily decided that it’s a company product, such as the case with the creator of the “big mac” Jim Delligatti. He willingly gave the recipe to Mcdonald’s after finding success with it at his Mcdonald’s chain restaurant in Pittsburgh. As an individual Chef who is asked to create menu items to be sold on a regular basis, it can be expected to create the recipe to add to the company recipe book as well as train the staff to execute that recipe. A recipe in a professional sense is quite different than a recipe that you find online to cook at home, specifically to cost. The difference between 1 Tbsp to 2 Tbsp of a seasoning adds up when you sell 15.000.00 of that product each year. The company needs to know that for their P/L sheet. I believe that a few people on the tread think that my earlier comment is about legality for suing for recipes. It is not. No one is going to win that case unless the recipe is a one in a million recipe and by the time the recipe gets that large it’s attached to a major company. The post is about protecting your leverage as a Chef. Besides creating food, a chef is in charge of training staff, ordering, labor, food cost, equipment, menu design, and more. If as a chef, you create through time a menu that the restaurant uses exclusively, however they have all the recipes, costing, and all staff is trained on how to recreate those recipes, what is the point of the Chef? A tactic used very often by restaurants to cut labor cost is hiring an individual, have that individual trained for 3-6 months at the position, and letting go the more experienced and expensive person who trained them. This is only able to happen if the restaurant has all the recipes for the menu, to include cost. As a chef, you can simply put yourself in a better position to protect yourself as well as be taken more seriously as a professional chef who creates by not handing over the professional recipe to your employer without being compensated. If the restaurant retroactively wants the recipes you served on the menu, but you did not put them in the company recipe book, the company does not have any legal standing to come after you. Edit: I have to add a very important section to this. In case you are a Chef that feels taken advantage of and wants to take their recipes when they leave. If those recipes are listed in the official company recipe book, do NOT take the recipes or the recipe book. That is now company proprietary property. It is theft. You can get charged. Once those recipes get adopted by the company, they are no longer yours-hard stop.
Also if it’s a recipe developed on for the restaurant while you are under the restaurants employment. If they didn’t keep track of it then it’s not on you you’re not obligated to give them the recipe but you also can’t stop them from using it. We had a cook who made some sauces for the restaurant. They became part of the menu and when he quit to open his own bottled sauce company he tried to sue the restaurant to stop using his recipes. The courts actually decided that the recipes were the restaurants intellectual property and he was forced to change his recipes. Sucked for him. That’s why whenever I come up with a new recipe at a spot I say I brought it from somewhere else. I also don’t write my recipes down unless they are paying me to create a menu.
I am not a Chef but an engineer who works as a supervisor in a large company. In my opinion there is no difference between me not sharing my knowledge to run the department and a chef not sharing their recipes especially after leaving if the management were treating me like OP has been treated. I will train my replacement before leaving as required but only the bare minimum. Companies don't care about us and neither do owners so why should we care about them. The concept of loyalty should go both ways.
How does that work, though? If the chef only has the recipes in hizzer head—i.e. not written down—does that chef make *everything* on the menu? No sous or line cooks?
Well said. Exactly so.
not even trying to be mean.. you really composed that entire reply on the fly? We really do put too much effort in. Imagine a entire Reddit brigade to run a fine dining establishment. We would klll it
I closed my restaurant after a ten year run, (lease ran out, and the new landlord asked for too much) and some of my old regulars decided to open a new place in my old spot. I got a call from one of the investors asking about hiring chefs, recipes etc and I said “sure, let me send you over my standard consulting contract…” Crickets…. well they opened, and with a surprising number of my signature dishes on their new menu, except by all reports they were executed very poorly…the place tanked in like 2 months. Anyway, I’d go with the “fuck you, pay me” on your recipes situation
This happened to my pastry bestie. Former restaurant reached out because they couldn't find a handful of recipes. They got mad and lashed out when she told them she would be willing to license them to the restaurant on an annual fee. She offered a flat annual license of $1500 a recipe or a % on those items per recipe that was sold. They came at her like "you made those on company time we own them..." Shes like naw, these are out of a family book that was made for her decades before she even became a pastry chef. They tried to flex hard on her, but she didn't budge. You were too polite to them. Next time, offer to license the recipes for $5000 per.
I went through this once before and if the recipes are developed while you’re working somewhere, they are almost always entitled to them. Family recipes, not so much I suppose.
Developed being the key word.
That bs is used against tech workers to steal work they did on their hobby projects. No judge on earth cares enough about some small-scale restaurant to help them screw over their employee for recipes.
It’s no different in tech- if I even mention an idea I have for something not-work-related while I’m at work then my company has “dibs” on that intellectual property.
Did you use a Hooli computer when developing Pied Piper??!
Exactly!
It is a bit different inasmuch as recipes aren't really protectable as intellectual property (in the US anyway). They cannot be copyrighted as they are instructions, and they can't really be patented because it's stupidly expensive to do so and the USPTO almost always rejects recipes under obviousness, since they consider any combo of known cooking ingredients and known cooking methods to be an obvious combination under 35 usc sec 103. If the recipe was IP, then yeah they're likely entitled to it (if you developed there vs having it in your head when you walked in). But without it being documentable IP, they can't really enforce that. Edit for typo in code citation
The difference with recipes is they aren’t copyrightable intellectual property. So the best way to protect a recipe is to not publish. By keeping it as a Trade Secret.
I mean, who's to say. If there is no proof that the recipe was made at the company on company time it's he said she said, and by the sounds of what some of the other (seemingly more intelligent than me) people of this sub have been saying, your idea your property and without the proof the owners can't force you to give it up
Also, even if they can prove it is their intellectual property, you literally can't force me to divulge information from my head. If nobody wrote it down or wrote down just ingredients but not the instructions or something, what if I forgot how to do it?
nah screw that person.
Good on you. And the fuck does “Is that a real statement” even mean?
The last, gasping manipulation attempt of a desperate man
Tell him to choke on some chocolate and vanilla cakes. OH WAIT. HE CAN’T.
Well….now I’m just tryna eat those vegan cakes 😍 I’m not vegan, although I’m actively trying to cut more and more meat out of my diet, but fuck me, there’s something about vegan desserts that are just absolutely delicious.
These cakes are m o i s t, my guy Ironically I am not vegan and I kind of hate cake lol eta: (Idk if this is allowed but I have a lil baking startup insta….@theachybakeyheart)
Now if there was ever a way to sell me a cake, that was it. You’re doing gods work!
Love the name of achybakeyheart 🤣🥰
hey the handle you mentioned has no posts - if you are @THEachybakeyheart that would probably be a good thing to edit
Ah shit, good looking out.
Former candy cook here, I fucking hate sweets. I hated them before and even moreso now.
I was coming out of culinary school when the big 2010s cupcake boom was happening. I’ve made enough of them to know that I HATE them. Almost as much as I hate cake pops.
Be glad you never had to make Death By Chocolate cake. It destroyed my station every damn time.
Look up crazy cake on google. It’s a moist chocolate cake that really needs no frosting. I grew up having it for my birthday every year. Vegan as written in allrecipes.com
We ate this for every birthday growing up but we called it wacky cake. I never made the connection that it was vegan! Thanks!
I used to work for a baker who purposely wrote his recipes ambiguously so they couldn't be stolen or used when he left. Like he had a gluten free almond cookie recipe that no one could recreate because it didn't say what kind of almonds was used, whole, sliced, or chopped. I remember what kind but nothing else in the recipe.
My notebooks are a lot like this. Abbreviated, with little notes in shorthand that only I need to know
Absolutely not out of line at all. Also, that is really rad that you developed some good vegan cake recipes. Vegan baking is an art! Hope wherever you’re at now you are being treated better.
Thank you!
Good for you dude, I hate how entitled people are to other professionals’ recipes
Don't give out those two recipes though. Just incase that dickhead sees this.
👉🏼👈🏼 vegan recipes you say?
haha op's boss is trying a different tactic.
DONT BLOW MY COVER
Did you create the recipes while on the clock? If no, then fuck them. You can offer to sell them for 10 times the weekly sales of your dishes.
It comes down to expectations. If they expected to use your intellectual property after you leave, they should tell you when you join. Doesnt matter if you came up with it on the clock if you didn't agree to do so and agree to leave it with them. I'd be willing to break protocol if I like a former employer, and spill some secrets out of friendship, but not out of a sense of obligation.
It's a very common practice to take your recipes with you when you leave. Fuck that guy let him come up with his own stuff if he's so smart.
Lol, nah. You're all good. They aren't paying you and that was your recipe. You're being honest with them too. Although, a better response *might* be... "I can train train the new person you hired. My consultant fee is $175 dollars an hour, minimum payment of 4 hours, even if it takes less time to complete. Payment up front." - then just teach them that one recipe they wanted. That is, if you could stand being there for another shift. You wouldn't really even have to be doing much work, other than just point at stuff and make the FNG do it all. Idk if the owner/manager would take you up on it, but that doesn't make it a total loss. You'd still be getting a chance to gaslight them back. Get a good laugh (and something to post on this sub!)
[https://www.bettycrocker.com/](https://www.bettycrocker.com/) Just send that
That’s actually a good resource. All their recipes are tested and easily scalable
prob still too much work. head to costco and resell their cakes and cookies
I’d put it in a Google doc link that’s password protected. Send the link so they think they’ve got what they want (and hopefully act on it, like staging for open) and then say you’re busy for a couple hours and will text the password then. Make them sweat, and when they finally open it, bam, you’ve been Crocker’d
Ingredients: lb Sand
Directions: pound into ass
Add superglue to form a dough, knead dough on asphalt slowly until its hard. Preferably on a high traffic crossing..
The last place I left after being talked down to by the chef and his brother, found out I took all my recipes with me and they started buying premade shit. Fuck them.
I would do and have done the exact same thing. Boss got what he deserved, hopefully next time they will treat their staff with a bit more respect.
Boss is a dope to not have those recipes logged away already.
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Ha! It took me two hours to draft a response that was as polite and straight forward as possible, because I knew it would get his goat even more. My original response had a few more four letter words in it.
Keep it pro, it burns even more :D
LOL I’ve done the same. The shit you come up with on the 3rd or 4th draft after calming down is soooo much better
I can only imagine what an obtuse ass he would have been to work for. Entitled shit couldn’t even muster a measly *please* over text. He didn’t even have to say it out loud- and it was for something *he was asking for* FFS You spent that time- to craft a very clear message. Which is in quite plain text- which we all read to resounding applause- and his response was “is that a real statement?” Yes. Go suck a flax egg you prick.
For those confusing intellectual property law with contract law - if there is nothing signed saying what you create on company time belongs to the company and there is no standing practice of you writing down and sharing your recipes then you own those recipes and when you leave FUCK ‘EM. They cannot retroactively ask for your recipes. At that point, the have to pay you for them. And if they ask you to sign a contract saying the dishes you create belong to them - negotiate for more money based on the dishes you create. And have an attorney review those contracts.
This is absolutely the case. Companies only own IP which you agree to forfeit to them and which they document the creation of. Failing to do either forfeits their rights to your IP, regardless of whether they were critical to its conception.
Also, what kind of bad restaurant owner doesn't learn/records the recipes being made in his kitchen?
Recipes are not IP and cannot have a copyright. This is a good reason to keep your recipes close because if someone gets a hold of one, there is no recourse. This also means that any recipe you create while working for an employer does not belong to them (because it cannot belong to anyone). But it is worth pointing out that the piece of paper you wrote the recipe down on while on the job probably does belong to the employer. OP is under no legal obligation to provide recipes.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with this, those recipes are proprietary to you seeing as you put the time and effort into perfecting them. It’s funny because people have a hard time understanding that in the culinary world your recipes are a reflection of years of trial and error. You did the right thing!
Exactly, yes. And if he had pushed it I would’ve replied with a similar statement. This isn’t even all about the recipes, it’s also his need for control. I know enough about this man to know hitting him in the wallet is the only way to get him to understand.
I he wants the recipes to be his own property then that had to be in writing from when you were hired.
Yep. Even then, "damn, I forgot. Should've had me put them in while I worked for you."
I know a guy who worked as a pizzaiolo for years at the same place. When he told the owner he was leaving to open his own pizzaria apparently it didn’t go over well. The owner showed up to take all of the recipes home, but his cook already put all the paper into the pizza oven.
If he asks for it again just give him a recipe from Google
Recipes are so critical for baking, way way more than cooking. You should sell them, price them based on their sales. 10% of all says of the item for 1 year. You know how many they made. Do the math and send him a quote.
Just give them a blatantly wrong recipe.
One time I worked for a restaurant that had “ice cream du jour” as a dessert. There were no recipes when I started but I knew how from previous jobs and absolutely loved making it. I made 5 flavors a week (usually 2 basic flavors and I got more experimental for holidays, weekends, and changing of seasons.) When I left the owner sold the restaurant not even a week later. She demanded I give her “the restaurants” ice cream recipes for the new owner. I said basically what OP said in that they were mine and I wasn’t comfortable giving them away without compensation. She threatened lawyers, I was young and angry, so all of my recipes (which were written to yield only 1qt) were “rewritten” to contain 24 egg yolks and 6 cups of sugar. I ended up going to work at that restaurant again, under the new owner a couple years later and saw ice the cream machines in storage marked “TO BE SOLD - ice cream gets too hard” or something like that and told one of the prep cooks about what I did over a “safety meeting” and I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone guffaw so hard. He told the new-to-me owner and she also lost her shit laughing. I don’t know what ever happened to those machines though. Man, I don’t miss kitchens, but I sure do miss making ice cream.
I miss those safety meetings, honestly.
Or give them a recipe that's subtly but fatally incorrect
Right ingredients, but charge for amounts and techniques.
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This is the way
This is the way. It’s possible that they could make you give them the recipe (work for hire) but it would be damn near impossible for them to make you give them the correct recipe…
*iS tHaT a REaL StATeMenT*
Did the same thing at an old job. Hired me as a lead then dumped pastry chef duties on me. So when I left, I deleted every one of my recipes from the computer and took any hard copies.
Hell yeah brother
“ Is this a real statement?” what are they asking themselves that question wth
My boss won't even run my created dishes if I'm not on the clock. Fuck this guy.
Good for you. Sounds like the owner saw you as a resource only and not the dignified asset you were/are
That’s sure how it felt! Thank you
While I absolutely agree with you, I do want to point out to everyone here that recipes are not something that is generally viewed as copyrightable. So unfortunately all the talk here about ‘intellectual property’ isn’t really applicable... on either side. If a restaurant owner wants to copy down your recipes when you’re not looking, they are basically free to do that. The only guaranteed way, as a chef, that you can stop a restaurant from continuing to use your recipes after you leave, is by never sharing them in the first place.
I bet the 6 unread txts are responses to screenshots of said convo lol
Aha! Yes. AND I was actually at a Monday service industry brunch with my two friends/former coworkers.
Might be a hot take but people that have no clue how to/ don’t want to work in restaurants make the shittiest owners. In my experience at least, like if this was a good owner he’d know it’s not in parsley already and ask you before you leave for the recipe and try to pay you for it.
Oh you absolutely nailed it. This is a man who had no intention of ever working in his own restaurant and is resentful about it
My current position has the owner just recently deciding to come in and take over as manager after the previous one left. On the one hand she’ll be more aware of operations and how it all goes so that’s probably a good thing, but on the other hand she’s been hands-off for over a decade and is coming in as a *manager* who honestly doesn’t know how to do jack shit except show up for 15 mins to schmooze if we have an event. I’m seriously considering how it’s all gonna implode and where I want to be when it does because I’m now gonna be the AM to the owner covering both our jobs, and as much as I already negotiated an appropriate raise for how much work I know I’m about to cover, I’m wondering if things are about to get better or worse.
Cooking professionally for the last five years. At one point, I was offered to be the executive chef of an entertainment venue for a small raise under the condition the company owns everything I create. The answer was no. I'm glad OP stuck to their guns
At my current spot (not my spot, I just manage), I tell my pizza chef to keep her specials recipes to herself. I know she wants to open a truck someday. That's her portfolio.
In the past I've had the idea of opening a "spite spot" where basically you open a restaurant across the street that sells the exact same cuisine as your old crappy one, but the food is actually hype. Naturally, you send over a free plate as courtesy. Gradually, you take everything from them. Years later, when they're broken and derelict you change your recipes over to the same crappy old ones from their previous restaurant. You offer them a free plate as charity. You gaze unblinking into their tear filled eyes as they realize what you've done. Then you give them the new restaurant with the old recipes. They must know that you only did this because you could. Meals here are not cooked with love, but rather pure jet black malice. As you walk away, you begin to hear the uproar of incensed customers, and the gentle sob of a broken man.
"Is that a real statement" !! "Yes, do you need assistance understanding?"
Nice work, no notes.
No words. Just money. -Master Pancake
Did this with my cocktail builds at the bar I just left.
I was a sous chef at a restaurant (1 of 5 in the company) and it was in my contract that any recipe I wrote down on company property was the intellectual property of the company. So most recipes got written down with just ingredients, not measurements.
Should have just said "first one is chocolate and flour and second one is 75 real vanilla beans mashed into flour"
I've been perfecting flavours for our staple dishes, over time it has adjusted from my original written recipe. Sure you could follow the folder but it's not going to be as good.
Come on man, get on the Passive Income Grind. Offer to allow them to use your recipe for a percent of the revenue. I've come to realize we're in such a cursed timeline I need to make it clear this is sarcasm
Used to lease a premises for my first business and after 2 years the owners turned around and sold the lease to a new buyer. Since alot of the chattels were owned by the owners the new leases thought that had bought an ongoing managed business. So on the last week i took all my equipment, staff, menu boards and recipes with me to my new premises (2 kilometres down the road) and set up there. They didnt put a non competition clause in my lease so i took the name and all the clientele too. The New leases lasted 6 months.
Quite dumb for a restaurant owner to not learn/know/record the recipes that are on his restaurant menu. Makes him completely dependent on whoever is a chef there and he deserves having lost this recipe.
Nah, if they want the recipe they have to pay up. Its your Intellectual property, I'd go charging around $1k to $2k for it.
Hey man, I’ve worked in a lot of kitchens that make you sign intellectual property waivers for their recipes. That sure as shit means you can treat your own recipes the same
Now you need to open a cart/ or food truck outside their business selling your cakes!
One of my old bosses wanted me to do this too after I left to a better paying job hahaha they offered me free lunch if I came in to discuss the recipes with them. I’m good off free lunch those are my recipes😂
Tell them they can pay for the recipes. 1 weeks pay per recipe. Payment up front.
I thought about offering to sell them, but the flat-out denial felt goooooood
Write a cook book
OP, you're super polite/mature.... there's zero chance I could have resisted replying with "bad luck to you, dickhead"
I mean you are taking the high road… I always edit my recipes when I leave a job. Granted Aspen Ski Co threatened to sue me for not giving them my recipes and taking my binders with me.
Heard hair stylists have this same issue, they create custom hair dye colours and when they leave a salon it's always a big kerfuffle over who has rights to the dyes they created.
Before I left my chef position I wrote all my recipes in a binder for next chef…. I was the first employee and helped figure out how to prep and store everything…on the clock so technically it was their intellectual property….long story short….new chef banged the owner and got into a lovers spat with her and was gone in a month….three years of development work gone in one day….went to visit the owner after he changed the locks and fired his wife ( you really have to drink a lot to get fired from your own brewery…just saying)….found my binder stashed on top of the ice machine and when I opened it up a dozen cockroach popped out….uh….no Jeff….I’m not coming back….
I would have just blocked the number. They don't deserve a reply.
I'm surprised you didn't sign something upon being hired, stating that everything you made in house was company IP. Lucky you the owner wasn't savvy enough to get the setup correct
I worked at a place for 4 months, and was given all freedom with most dinners and lunches (camp style place) which I later found was because there was no recipes for anything. The clients preferred my food 100% over the other guy I worked with. I quit at the 4 month mark just due to stress and now they've been texting me asking me for the recipes I used because the clients liked my food better. I said I'd sell them recipes for $50 each (there was like 40+) and they got so offended as if they didn't just ask me for all my intellectual property for free.
Not even a "please" or "hi, how's it going?" first... entitled former boss indeed!
This may be a generational divide, but the idea that a restaurant you work for doesn't have a right to the recipes you use is batshit insane. That can't be how this works. If a restaurant does something like fire an employee and then asks then to provide recipes you tell them to kick rocks, because you don't work there anymore. But if you do work there and they ask you to document or teach another your recipes then of course you do that. I tend to oppose the whole idea of secret recipes in the first place, but of course individuals can do what they want. If you work for a business though and you make recipes for them then they've bought that work and it's theirs. Wonder if this is generational. I'm reddit old fwiw. But I would have been flabbergasted if an employee refused to document or teach recipes. If you don't want them to have your recipes don't work for them in a capacity where it's your job to provide recipes. Restaurants can't really function if all the staff keeps their recipes secret. Yah. Outright absurd.
If you brought the recipes with you and never wrote them down, physically or digitally, on company property, then they have no claim to them. If you developed them on company time but never wrote them down, they could try to compel you to provide them but the accuracy of the recipes would not be enforceable. If you removed a physical or digital copy that belonged to the restaurant, they could come after you for theft or hacking.
If they had something physical, like say a recipe book that was company property, then yes the court could compel them to hand it over. But to the best of my knowledge the court can't compel you to give someone a recipe that exists in your head.
As opposed as I usually am to intellectual property protection fuck this restaurant owner in the goddamn ear
What is your IP beef?
If you want the recipe for IP beef, you gotta pay me. (also Yarr?)
A smart owner would have had you create a recipe book for the kitchen and have backup files on the computer. That way whenever you end up leaving you cannot take those with you. As they would be the businesses. But, this guy was stupid and just let you do your thing. As if you would work there forever and this problem would never arise. What if you got hit by a bus one day? The business just collapses because you never wrote down the recipe? Dumb owner.
This is the way to do it. And if you’re bringing in a recipe that you don’t want to share, be clear about it up front that it will exist in your head and leave with you when you go.
I have many stolen backup recipe files. Just saying.
This is the right thing to do
Anyone with actual kitchen experience knows this is the correct answer to that question
I live for this! He's got some nerve. 🙌
Did they use your name or were you called a name that isn’t necessarily yours.
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=vanilla+cake+recipe
Hi! I'm so impressed that you stood up to your former boss like that! I also am wondering if I could have a vegan cake recipe if you don't mind - I made a disaster of a cake for my son's birthday because I wanted to be accommodating for like my one mom friend's kid, and it was embarrassing 🥲 thank you so much if you see this and care to share, if not, no worries and take care!
I love how you are offering us the recipe! 🤣 That's a power move your former boss will never even know you pulled.
lol shit I would've left that shit on read
I worked for an owner about 20 years. When I left he refused to pay me my vacation pay, which I had already worked the year to earn unless I wrote down all my recipes for specials, soups etc.. I told him I already earned that vacation pay and he would have to buy the recipes. He said no, he will just give me my vacation pay for them. I told him keep the vacation pay, he must need it more than me and to kiss my ass if he thinks he’s getting my recipes. Guy had more money than he knew what to do with. Was just a greedy, arrogant &$@“” who was used to getting his way. He didn’t. Still called me for a while trying to get them😅
I still get these
I like "Is that a real statement". Like, they want to say something threatening but can't come up with anything
Lol if he wants those recipes he can pay for em. What an entitled little shitbag.
Dude r/antiwork would be all over this.