When George Motz wanted to open a restaurant in New York in 2023, the obvious name was already taken. In Detroit, the name Motz’s Burgers had been in use since 1996. Motz pivoted and used the name of his 2004 documentary, Hamburger America. The name was trademarked, and the rest is history.
But not all conflicts involving restaurant names resolve that smoothly. In 2015, Wolfgang Puck battled Elon and Kimbal Musk over the name The Kitchen. Mario Batali and Gordon Ramsay clashed over The Spotted Pig, a name whose value has tanked in recent years, no matter what the good people of Traverse City, Michigan, will tell you. I’ve covered my share of naming controversies from Texas chef John Tesar’s meltdown over eating utensils, to seeing how a Chicago poke shop sent cease-and-desist letters to a battery of poke shops that used the word “aloha” in their names.
Randy Micheletti is a Chicago attorney who’s worked in intellectual property law since 2009 and says it could take years and legal costs that could approach $1 million to bring a trademark complaint before the courts. He bemoans how often his clients — both in and out of the restaurant world — fail to perform a perfunctory Google search to see if a name is taken. The federal trademark office is also to blame, only relying on its database: “They don't do that Google search. They don't look in state registration offices. They don't look at business names, they don't look at TikTok or any social media,” he says.
Micheletti brings up the famous Burger King case in Mattoon, Illinois, a town 185 miles from Chicago. The Hoots family opened a small restaurant in 1952 and filed for a state trademark in 1959. Meanwhile, the first restaurant that would sprout the Burger King chain debuted in 1953 in Jacksonville, Florida, and then quickly expanded to Illinois in 1961 when it filed for a federal trademark. The owners of the Mattoon restaurant felt fenced in and filed a lawsuit in 1968. Despite the chain’s federal trademark, the courts ruled the Mattoon restaurant had established a common law trademark while ruling that the chain could not open a store within 20 miles of the Mattoon restaurant. The chain has since opened about 300 locations in Illinois, all outside that court-mandated radius.
Most of the disputes are in the fast-casual world, the kind of world that attracts private equity, sailing into a new market with the audacity of a colonizer. However, there are some exceptions with fine dining restaurants. Smyth is a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in Chicago that opened in 2016. In December 2025, Smyth’s ownership filed a lawsuit against New York’s Smyth Tavern, which opened in 2022. The case is ongoing. Micheletti says the fact that the case was filed in Chicago, rather than New York, was unusual. It speaks to having home-court advantage in a world where restaurants want to prove that customers are confused by similarly named restaurants.
“Smyth Chicago doesn't have to have concrete plans to move to New York,” Micheletti says. “All they have to show is that it would be reasonable for them to want to move to New York or open up an establishment in New York.”
Reducing confusion is important for expanding brands, such as Milk Bar. In 2019, they sued the owners of JoJo’s Milk Bar in Chicago, claiming that the entity was feigning association with Christina Tosi’s brainchild. Seven years later, the Chicago entity rebranded to JoJo’s Shake Bar, while Milk Bar finally opened a Chicago location in 2025.
Then there’s the situation involving Chicago chef Rodolfo Cuadros, a Colombian American. Amaru debuted in 2019 and serves thoughtful Latin American fare in a cozy restaurant where vegans and omnivores can dine in harmony. Cuadros, who was forced to close a pair of restaurants over the last three years, feels threatened by a similarly named restaurant opening in another part of the city. Amara is a 125-seat Balkan restaurant set to open sometime this winter from another veteran Chicago chef. The restaurant’s menu takes inspiration from Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Turkey, and Greece, and its name has varied meanings in different parts of the world.
For Cuadros, this stings doubly as another of his since-closed bars, The Basement, was threatened with a cease-and-desist letter by the owners of The Bassment, a downtown Chicago bar with live music from the owners of the Hampton Social. The same Hampton Social whose workers staged protests over low pay in 2023 in Florida. Cuadros says the threat forced him to change their name. As a small business, he’d rather pick paying a worker versus filing for a trademark to protect his name: “I don't have a corporation behind me. How much can I bleed before I give up on something?” Cuadros says.
Cuadros says he’s been unsuccessful in communicating with Amara staff, trying social media and stopping by at an Amara pop-up. Meanwhile, former workers and associates have reached out in confusion, asking if Cuadros is expanding. “I just have a hard time understanding what's going on, especially in the day that we live in, in an age when branding is everything,” he says.
Amara chef Nemanja Milunovic is from Belgrade, and gushed at the opportunity to open a Balkan restaurant to show Chicagoans a variety of dishes that go beyond cevapci and burek. He mentions giving pašticada an upgrade with beef short rib. His passion reminds me of Cuadros, as both care about their cultural backgrounds and use them to inspire their menus. His business partner, Vincent Martin, downplayed any possible confusion. Martin also owns a steakhouse named Carbon, which could be confused with Carbon Live Fire Mexican Grill, a casual spot with two Chicago locations. “Originally, we wondered if we should be worried about this?" Martin says. “But we don't run into any speed bumps there, so I assume it would be the same with this.”
One train of thought believes AI searches will end this type of confusion with LLMs sifting through more sources versus a traditional web search. But Cuadros isn’t searching for an artificial savior. He named his restaurant for Túpac Amaru, the last Incan king famous for fighting Spanish colonists who brutalized the Indigenous population. As the Trump Administration began targeting Latines during the president’s first term, branding it as immigration reform, Cuadros and others felt disposable, an emotion that they continue to experience as ICE agents continue to target their friends and family. Cuadros adopted Túpac Amaru, much like the rapper did, as his symbol of resistance: “That’s the name of a martyr that fought for equality… and clearly it's a fight that Brown people were still fighting in this fucking country,” Cuadros says.
Exhausted, Cuadros quickly asks to be forgiven for his language and says he doesn’t expect a miracle, but just wants a conversation with Amara’s brass: “I don't want bad blood, you know, like with anybody. But I don't know what else to say.”
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