I Used AI to Steal a Michelin-Starred Chef’s Recipe—Dave Beran (Probably) Has Grounds to Sue

While I understand why people are panicking about how artificial intelligence might be used for evil, I’m personally focused on using it for evil.

Look, I’m a professional journalist. I was being destroyed by technology before AI. I have to do what I can.

So, after eating at Seline, my friend Dave Beran’s amazing tasting menu restaurant, I thought: “I bet I can steal his recipe.” I fed ten photos of one of my favorite Seline dishes, Coffee, Caviar, into Claude, along with these instructions: “Create a cookbook-style recipe based on these photos of this dessert called ‘coffee, caviar.’ Use real caviar as an ingredient.”

Claude came up with a recipe with 30 grams of sturgeon caviar spooned on top of a coffee-vanilla cream, garnished with edible flowers. It seemed like it had completely nailed it.

Dave thought otherwise.

“It’s reminiscent of what a culinary student would do,” he texted me. “The dish isn’t really about the coffee and caviar pairing. Coffee and caviar really don’t pair that well together. It’s about how this relationship came to be.” Which was when Dave was drinking a Dunkin’ Donuts French Vanilla-flavored coffee one morning in his work kitchen while tasting a supplier’s Osetra caviar, noticing they shared some notes of hazelnut and brown butter. So Dave doesn’t make a coffee-vanilla cream like Claude guessed; he makes an egg-heavy custard. Coffee goes with the egg, as does the caviar. “Without the egg element, the dish is a massive failure. But this comes through understanding not how to make something, but how to connect two things that seem so far apart.”

When Dave sent me his recipe for Coffee, Caviar, I saw that Claude wasn’t even close. It was way more complicated. Claude completely omitted the vanilla mist, which is steeped for 48 hours and sprayed on each dish before serving. It also missed the 3 grams of lapsang tea oil that goes with the hazelnuts on top. Stupid Claude.

But Dave doesn’t dislike AI. In fact, he used it to generate images of the restaurant for the investor deck he created for Seline. So he suggested that I feed Claude the ideas he had when he created Coffee, Caviar and see if it could come up with a new dish.

Though I was too dumb to realize it while I ate it, Dave made the dish to “serve caviar in a non-traditional manner. To move it away from something that one covets. So the stacking of bowls is a nod to Thomas Keller, but the material chosen to stack is broken concrete, which is the most pedestrian and imperfect material we have—the opposite of his porcelain.”

I instructed Claude, using a description Dave came up with, to “invent a dish for Seline in Santa Monica, a high-end tasting menu restaurant. Refute the notion of luxury with caviar in the dish presentation and walk the line of refinement and rustic with the presentation of a luxury ingredient. Include a cookbook-style recipe and a name for the dish.”

It spat out a dish called Tide Pool Memories. Claude described it this way: “This dish challenges traditional caviar presentations by drawing inspiration from the Santa Monica tidepools, presenting luxury ingredients in a way that connects with the raw beauty of the California coast.”

The dish consisted of cultured cream with kelp powder, topped with a scoop of sturgeon caviar, surrounded by dollops of frothed ‘sea foam’ made from salt water, soy lecithin, yuzu juice, and cypress oil.

Tide Pool Memories Dishes Created By AI

After reading it, Dave said, “That sounds like an interesting course.” With some tweaking, he added, “it could be made into something great.” In fact, he would like to find someone to pay us to sit around and test and improve AI recipes. I’m hoping that someone is S.Pellegrino.

And the recipes will need a whole lot of tweaking, including Tide Pool Memories. For starters, Dave wants to change Claude’s description. “There aren’t tide pools here,” he said.

But is this evil of us? Or are we just bold creators wielding a new tool, the way Escoffier used refrigeration to create Peach Melba and Ferran Adrià used spherification to make liquid olives? And—in a society where Instagramming your meal is more important than eating it—aren’t the AI-invented drawings as good as an actual dish?

I’m guessing the diners at my upcoming $495 per person AI-built tasting menu restaurant (investor deck pending) won’t notice details like that. Or the fact that robots cooked their food. Or the fact that their servers don’t have the normal number of fingers.

Dave and I are going to be very, very rich.