Uses for Obsession by Ben Shewry

Author:Ben Shewry [Ben Shewry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Murdoch Books
Published: 2024-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

FALSE PROPHETS

Let’s start with a home truth: restaurants rip off other people’s dishes all the time. Now, before we go on, there’s an important difference between copying and paying homage. Restaurant lover and hip-hop impresario Adam Briggs once said to me, on the difference between sampling and plagiarism: ‘In sampling we are doing history, it’s part of our musical journey, some of these producers are on a genius level of understanding jazz, funk, soul, all these things that are the cornerstones of hip-hop and electronic music. Homage means that you are open. If I tasted something at your restaurant, and I was like, Holy shit, I gotta put this on my menu at my pizza joint, I’d ask you. It’s about respect. This is what artists strive for too. You have to approach it with humbleness, otherwise you’ll be humbled. Only a person who doesn’t know themselves would try to hide their influences. That’s just facts.’

Some of the most established restaurants have ‘borrowed’ ideas and not attributed them. There was a time in recent history when a dish of ‘Lobster on a rock’ was served, unattributed, in nearly every large city around the world, and that idea only came from one place: Copenhagen.

It’s happened to me too. I recall a meal at a high-profile restaurant overseas (not in Copenhagen) where, prior to my visit, the chef had eaten at Attica and, flatteringly, been very excited by his meal. During my meal at his restaurant, he took me out of the dining room to another part of the building for a different experience, resplendent with art and food – a signature Attica move – and, embarrassingly, whispered in my ear that this was directly inspired by our work. He only said this because it was so obviously a rip-off. Unfortunately, he failed to mention this to any of his other guests.

That’s short-term shitty behaviour, but even before this, several other chefs from his own country had complained to me about him ‘borrowing’ their ideas. Many of those chefs were not in the same position of power as this chef was, and that’s when it really hurts and has impact. Plagiarism is an emotional and economical gut punch when you are starting out. But who gave the power to this chef in the first place? Of course, it was a ‘Jimmy’, one of the faceless critics who wanted to be first to celebrate this fake dude and false prophet – a chef whose career was made with the speed of a cheaply built tower block rising out of the ground – in a rush to tick the boxes of whatever social movement of the moment they felt they ought to be covering.

Earlier that same year, in 2022, a Jimmy misattributed my work, again. I honestly would have preferred to never think or write about them again, but here we are! This time I was forced to witness a chef being given a major award for plagiarising my cooking, with a copy of a dish I created inside an emu eggshell in 2016.

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