A few weeks ago, I served as a judge on a food program in China, where I met many chefs and got a close look at how they develop new dishes. I was particularly impressed by one dish: a steamed egg custard topped with a rich crab paste made from crab roe and fat. It was a combination I had never considered before. The crab paste had a delicate aroma and a rich, oily texture, while the steamed egg custard was soft and silky, perfectly balancing its richness.

I was struck by the dish’s ingenuity, but it also raised a question: Would people be willing to pay for the recipe and instructions on how to make it?

I put this question to one of the chefs on the program. He smiled at me as though I were a child and asked why anyone would pay for a recipe. He then let me in on an industry secret: When a restaurant discovers that a competitor has introduced a new dish, it will order it and have its own chefs taste it, analyze its ingredients, cooking techniques, and seasonings, and work out how it was made. In most cases, they can reproduce it. The chef told me he had recreated other people’s dishes and had his own copied by others.

It all sounded rather cutthroat. The person who bears the cost of innovation often reaps little of the reward.

In Chinese cuisine, creating a new dish is not nearly as simple as diners might imagine. Chefs must find the right ingredients, adjust proportions, experiment with different cooking temperatures, refine textures, and continually adjust based on customer feedback. Developing a successful dish can involve dozens or even hundreds of failed attempts before it is ready to serve.

The time, ingredients, and labor costs of this trial-and-error process are all borne by the original creator. Yet as soon as the dish reaches the table, anyone can observe, taste, analyze, and even reproduce it. For a competitor, learning most of the techniques needed to make a dish may cost little more than the price of a meal.

Even more frustrating, many of these innovators lack the resources to promote their creations. A small restaurant might be the first to develop a dish but lack the advertising budget, media exposure, or network of locations to popularize it. Meanwhile, a larger restaurant can simply copy the dish and quickly introduce it to a wider audience. Since more people encounter it there first, they may assume the larger restaurant came up with it.

This suggests that the first-mover advantage does not necessarily apply in the restaurant business. Being first matters only if consumers know who created the dish and the original creator has the resources and business acumen to turn that innovation into a brand and a source of revenue. Otherwise, the creator is essentially providing free research and development while introducing consumers to a dish that benefits the entire market.

The challenge of protecting intellectual property is not unique to Chinese cuisine. It affects chefs around the world. Business schools often hold up KFC’s fried chicken recipe as a classic example of a trade secret, but the company’s real competitive advantage lies in its supply chains, restaurant network, and brand value. The law does not prohibit you from reverse-engineering KFC’s fried chicken and making it yourself, or even selling it to your neighbors, provided you don’t market it as “KFC Original Recipe Chicken.” For smaller restaurants, therefore, protecting a recipe may matter less than building the brand and reputation that give it lasting commercial value.

The celebrated 18th-century Chinese food writer Yuan Mei associated dishes with particular names as a way of preserving their origins. For example, in his influential cookbook “Suiyuan Shidan” (“Recipes from the Garden of Contentment”), he included dishes called “Prefect Wang’s eight-treasure tofu” and “Governor Yang’s tofu.” In this way, no matter how often later generations copied these dishes, their names remained tied to their origins.

However, this naming convention has its limitations. Prefect Wang, Governor Yang, and the better-known Kung Pao (of Kung Pao chicken fame) all refer to the chefs’ employers rather than the people who actually did the cooking. Only in his “Biography of Chef Wang Xiaoyu” did Yuan Mei praise a chef, elevating an obscure kitchen worker to a culinary figure remembered by later generations.

Similarly, General Tso’s chicken is familiar to almost everyone in the United States, yet few know the name Peng Chang-kuei, the chef credited with creating the dish and introducing it to America. Diners know the name of General Tso, but not the person behind the dish.

One way to recognize innovative chefs would be to give them explicit credit for their creations. For example, instead of simply labeling a dish “Chef’s Recommendation,” menus could identify the chef or team of chefs who developed it, along with the restaurant and year it first appeared. This would acknowledge the contributions of both the creators and the restaurants that invested in their work.

Chefs could also license their original recipes to restaurants and large chains. Another possibility would be to establish an industry-wide registry of original dishes, where chefs and restaurants could record development dates, launch locations, photographs, and successive versions of their recipes. That way, even if other restaurants later copied a dish and achieved greater commercial success, its creator’s contribution would not simply be forgotten.

Of course, implementing such measures would not be easy. The greatest resistance might not even come from imitators, but from within the restaurants where new dishes are developed.

For restaurant owners, naming a dish after its creator also poses risks. Chefs tend to move between jobs, and when one leaves, dishes bearing their name could become an awkward legacy, potentially even requiring a restaurant to overhaul its menu. At the same time, chefs have traditionally enjoyed relatively low social status. Within restaurants, they often have little say in day-to-day operations and limited bargaining power to protect their own interests, making it difficult to secure adequate recognition for their contributions.

These two problems are closely related. When chefs receive little recognition for their work and feel little ownership over the dishes they create or the restaurants where they work, they may be more inclined to leave. This, in turn, gives restaurants even less incentive to credit individual chefs. It may help explain why, in the rare cases in which a dish bears its creator’s name — such as Fei Da Chu’s chili stir-fried pork, sold in cities across China — the chef behind it is also the restaurant’s owner.

Protecting and rewarding the creators of original dishes, whether through naming rights or other institutional and technological mechanisms, could help raise chefs’ social status, strengthen their bargaining power, and create a more equitable relationship between chefs and restaurant owners. Restaurants, in turn, could attract diners who appreciate the work of individual chefs and are willing to pay for originality. The result could be a positive cycle of culinary innovation, recognition, and consumption.

A dish may be replicated almost perfectly, but the experience, creativity, and reputation behind it cannot. The chef who conceived the idea, the sous chefs who tested the recipe, the team members who continually refined it, and the restaurant that provided the resources and space for experimentation all contributed to the story behind the dish. Recognizing their contributions is about more than giving credit where it is due. It is also about respecting the generations of chefs who have shaped Chinese cuisine and ensuring that their knowledge, skills, and traditions continue to be valued.

(Header image: The illustration in the center depicts Yuan Mei, a Qing Dynasty poet, scholar, and artist, in a 19th-century painting by Chinese artist Ye Yanlan. Images from VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone.)