The Top Chef Plagiarism Scandal Everyone's Talking About

Did Chef Danny *steal* his winning dish from a former colleague? It's plagiarism! Plate-giarism!

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.

—

The Chou Thief; Or: What Chou Talm Bout, Victoria?

David Moir/Bravo

If you’ll remember from last week’s Top Chef, Chef Danny Garcia (above) won the CHAOS-themed elimination challenge with his “Scallop Chou Farci, Yuzu Kosho, Vin Jaune,” pictured below.

chef.dannygarcia

A post shared by @chef.dannygarcia

I don’t know what half those words are either, but it’s not important right now. At issue is the fact that right after Garcia posted the dish on Instagram, a few users called him out for “stealing” the dish from Chef Victoria Blamey, for whom Garcia used to work with at the restaurant Mena in New York.

Delish notes that Garcia was Blamey’s executive sous chef when Mena opened in 2022. Blamey herself posted an Instagram story basically confirming the callouts, writing:

"This dish was created while I opened Mena by me between 2021-2022…to have someone copy the exact same dish and win Top Chef is not only a lack of moral and professionalism but a sad demonstration how this person has no creative guts of his own," she wrote. "Surprise that Bravotopchef doesn’t do their research better."

Me, and may I add, yow.

Obviously, plagiarism is a complicated issue in kitchens. When Buddha Lo won a challenge for making Rigatoni Alla Amatriciana (“Marry Me Pasta,” as he called it), he didn’t claim to invent Amatriciana. Probably no one on the show assumed he did. It’s just a classic dish at this point, like Beef Wellington or Eggs Benedict. There are a lot of those on the show. As another commenter in Garcia’s post noted, Ilhan from season 2 made dishes from his restaurant basically the entire season and he ended up winning.

That being said, it is a little weird to put out a dish from a restaurant you worked at when the challenge in question is “Break all the rules! Do something completely insane!” It’s also weird for a chef not to just say “this is a dish I learned at X restaurant” when they’re recreating this one, but in this case, Danny had an obvious motive for not doing so based on the challenge. If he would’ve said that, he almost certainly wouldn’t have won.

Repurposing a dish from a restaurant where you worked isn’t that weird on Top Chef, and happens all the time. Doing it in a CHAOS challenge, and not crediting the restaurant, is a little weird. And the fact that his old boss trashed him for it seems to underline that.

BUT!

Sometimes bosses also take undue credit for an essentially collaborative process, just ask Thomas Edison. To that end, some Reddit users dug up an old article with Blamey discussing the dish, in which she actually credited Garcia directly for coming up with part of it:

“This one is funny. We were working on a monkfish for the longest time, wrapped in seaweed with this scallop mousse. We kept going back thinking that we liked it, but we were not extremely happy with it. So, I said ‘You know what? What if we start working on the mousse itself?’ Our executive sous chef Daniel Garcia has this really good recipe, so I said, ‘What if we make it around the mousse?’”

Success has a thousand fathers and all of that. Coming up with a component isn’t quite the same as coming up with the finished dish, and maybe that’s the only reason she seems pissed, or maybe there’s something more between them. From his end, I can see feeling a sense of ownership over something if you came up with the part you consider the crucial component. (I’ve always said that the scallop is the best part of the moose).

And yet, there is something slightly underhanded about redoing a dish you’ve made 1,000 times in a “Do something crazy and creative!” challenge. Any other challenge, sure, but this one was specifically about improvisation and inventiveness, and he definitely kind of just faked that part. (The part about Blamey angry that Top Chef didn’t “do their research” is kind of funny, because what are they supposed to do, scour every menu of every restaurant their contestants have ever worked?)

Whether that’s sketchiness or just gamesmanship is sort of in the eye of the beholder. Personally, I would’ve given Danny a pass if he just admitted what he did in the post interview, congratulating himself for getting away with it. Especially if he made an “aren’t I lil’ stinker??” face.

I just wish Matty Matheson was here to explain, “Maybe the ugly dispute with his former employer is the chaos.”