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Gary Menes’s Twitter Rant Against Customer
May 16, Saturday… Gary Menes had a customer seated at 6:00 pm who reportedly had to wait for around 30 minutes.
Instead of apologizing for the delay as any normal restaurant person would… these tweets were posted by Gary Menes himself while in the kitchen around 8:30 pm while there were other customers in the same restaurant.
@TheJohnDiMaggio you guys could use smaller portions if you know what I mean.
— Gary Menes (@garymenes) May 17, 2015
@TheJohnDiMaggio who drinks a dessert wine while eating cheese. That's a course on its own. Maybe you need to visit France more often.
— Gary Menes (@garymenes) May 17, 2015
Thoroughly inappropriate behavior considering the circumstances.
@TheJohnDiMaggio your the one that showed 72k of followers that you are an irresponsible tweeter. Your rants are psychotic.
— Gary Menes (@garymenes) May 17, 2015
Bizarre…
@TheJohnDiMaggio I know work is hard to come by. My dog with a blog was a good effort.
— Gary Menes (@garymenes) May 17, 2015
The customer’s later tweets may have gone into insulting territory, but it would not have escalated at all without Gary Menes initiating the escalation.
U.S. Company Blocks San Miguel on Magnolia!!!
Magnolia is a Philippine ice-cream brand whose origins clearly go back to the 1920s. It has belonged to the San Miguel Corporation for most of its history.
IP Philippines Registration No. 42004005904
San Miguel Corporation, Philippines
Source: World Intellectual Property Organization
In the 1970s, a completely unaffiliated Filipino American family in Northern California started marking their own ice-cream products with the “Magnolia” name in order to surf on the goodwill that the original Magnolia had developed among Filipinos from the old country. (This assertion was voiced by U.S. federal judge Richard Clifton himself during oral arguments in Case No. 13-55537.)
The Filipino American family Quesada, operating as the Ramar company, filed a trademark application in the early 1990’s claiming the Magnolia mark for their exclusive use in the United States, based on their use of that name and logo for decades. The fact that San Miguel had been using the Magnolia name and logo for much longer in the Philippines and was the originator of that brand name was irrelevant under U.S. law.
USA trademark serial number: 74297882
Ramar Foods, California, USA
Source: Trademarkia
To this day, many Filipino Americans assume that the Magnolia ice-cream they eat in the United States is related to the Magnolia in the Philippines. It is not.
The U.S. brand name and company logo are strikingly similar to the homeland’s original, but it is California’s Ramar Foods, and not the Philippines’ San Miguel, that’s profiting. Ramar’s rationale behind the appropriation is that San Miguel “did not have the vision to know they could sell to Filipinos here.” In effect, brand-name piracy is considered smart business sense in the United States. It may be unethical, but it’s legal.
In 2005, the Wall Street Journal focused on this particular brand-name piracy issue, in which companies in the United States appropriate trademarks from overseas. The article noted that the trend has been buoyed by U.S. immigrants who favor buying the traditional brands they cherished in their home countries. Not surprisingly, these consumers are quick to assume that a product in the U.S. with a name from home is the product they grew up with. In this case, it is not.
Transcript: San Miguel Philippines vs. Ramar Foods USA
Summary: United States company isn’t content with just appropriating the Magnolia ice-cream brand from the Filipino originator, Ramar USA also wants to prevent San Miguel Philippines from selling Magnolia-branded butter, margarine and cheese in the United States.
United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
Case Name: San Miguel Pure Foods Co., et al v. Ramar Int’l Corp., et al
Case Number: 13-55537
Case Panel: NELSON, TASHIMA, CLIFTON
Hearing Location: Pasadena, CA
Hearing Date: 04/07/2015
Ramar International Corp. asked the Ninth Circuit to broaden an injunction in the fight over its “Magnolia” trademark, saying that allowing rival San Miguel Pure Foods Co. to sell certain dairy products under the “Magnolia” name is diluting its trademark.
JUDGE NELSON: “Does the record show why Ramar waited so long to object to San Miguel’s use
of the label on butter, margarine, and cheese? How can San Miguel’s infringement be willful if San Miguel knew that Ramar knew of the products and didn’t object?”
LAWYER: “We didn’t know… We challenged San Miguel in the 1990s on ice cream… We sued their distributor… San Miguel sued us in the 1990s… We found a distributor in the 1990s… The first time we found out about the butter, margarine and cheese was in 2009 when Susie Quesada was sent information about various other products. Her testimony was that, ‘We were absolutely stunned… been through this with them before.'”
JUDGE CLIFTON: “How did your client come up with the Magnolia name and the trademark?”
LAWYER: “We adopted the Magnolia name in the early 1970s.”
JUDGE CLIFTON: “Where did it come from? They liked a certain kind of trees?”
LAWYER: “No, Your Honor. It came from the fact that there was a Magnolia product in the Philippines starting in the 1920s, and that product was not available for sale here, so my clients who were immigrants adopted the mark because they were selling ice-cream products that had flavors that reminded Filipinos of the flavors they could get at home.”
32:15
JUDGE CLIFTON: “Or it helps you… Because let’s face it. Your client is surfing on the goodwill established 40 years ago. Now it may have developed the brand past that, but it’s not like they think the Magnolia trademark used by somebody else is a drag on them. Because they picked it up from San Miguel’s usage in the first place.”
Ramar’s lawyer insinuates before the court that San Miguel will be selling “moldy cheese” under the Magnolia brand in the United States. Though repeatedly being reminded that product quality is of no relevance to the legal points being debated, Ramar’s lawyer keeps sneaking in the innuendo that products made by San Miguel, a major Philippine company with a long history of consumer trust in Asia, are inferior.
TRANSCRIPTION TO BE POSTED IN FULL. CURRENTLY ONLY EXCERPTS ON THIS PAGE.
RECAP OF THE MAGNOLIA ISSUE HERE
0011547440006
U.S. Circuit Judges Dorothy Wright Nelson, Richard Clifton and A. Wallace Tashima sat on the panel for the Ninth Circuit.
San Miguel is represented by Allan Gabriel, Walead Esmail and Craig Nevin Hentschel of Dykema Gossett PLLC.
Ramar is represented by Mark A. Lemley and Alex J. Feerst of Durie Tangri LLP, and Rachel R. Davidson, Holly Hogan and J. Michael Keyes of K&L Gates LLP.
The case is San Miguel Pure Foods Co. et. al. v. Ramar International Corp. et al., case number 13-55537, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
13-55537
13-55965 San Miguel Pure Foods Co. v. Ramar Int’l Corp. – Ramar International Corp. appeals, and San Miguel Pure Foods Co. and others cross-appeal, the district court’s judgment on claims of infringement of “Magnolia” trademarks for ice cream and other foods. [2:11-cv-09747-RGK-FMO]
2015-04-07 9:00 am Courtroom 2, Richard H. Chambers US Court of Appeals, Pasadena
Before: D.W. NELSON, TASHIMA and CLIFTON, Circuit Judges