Legal News

The Law Blog?s Heartstopping Lawsuit of the Day

By Ashby Jones

Well this should be interesting to watch. Two restaurants that unapologetically do harm to their patrons are now trying to do harm to each other.

The owner of an Arizona restaurant called Heart Attack Grill, an eatery that dishes up artery-clogging burger-and-fries, including the so-called Quadruple Bypass Burger (pictured), has filed a federal lawsuit against the owners of a Florida restaurant called Heart Stoppers Sports Grill, accusing them of stealing his idea for a heart-attack-inducing menu. Click here for the story, from Slashfood.

“Heart Attack Grill is the originator of the medically themed hamburger grill and restaurant,” the South Florida Sun-Sentinel quoted Basso’s lawyer, Robert Kain, as saying. “It sells high-calorie food products and we have had very extensive media coverage, including numerous shows on the Travel Channel and the Food Network.”

Kain told Slashfood that the Heart Stoppers owners had been in talks to acquire a Heart Attack Grill franchise license before they broke off negotiations. In December, they opened their own restaurant instead.

The lawsuit outlines a handful of ways Heart Stoppers is allegedly similar, including signs with EKG heart monitors on them, waitresses dressed as nurses and offers of free food to patrons weighing more than 350 pounds.

But a lawyer for Heart Stoppers claimed the restaurants were different. “It’s not the same concept,” Eric Lee told Slashfood. “The Arizona restaurant’s concept is high-caloric food that is bad for you and will basically kill you . . . My guys have a restaurant that is medically themed . . . My clients’ restaurant seems more like an actual medical facility.”

Uh, really? A medical facility? Apparently so. Heart Stoppers is, according to Slashfood, decorated with defibrillators, dialysis machines and other medical equipment, has tables that resemble wheelchairs.

If it sounds mildly humorous, well, that’s not exactly Salon writer Sara Breselor’s take. In a recent column, she writes:

I’m not interested in whether Jon Basso, the “brains” behind The Heart Attack Grill, is a marketing genius or whether Heart Stoppers copied Heart Attack and I’m not even interested in the obvious question of why we would ever need more than one of these restaurants. I’m interested in that fact that we still believe that limiting unhealthy food somehow impinges on our freedom, and that we still have this defiant need to go overboard as a means of asserting our independence and/or “sticking it to the man.”

The true perversity of The Heart Attack Grill is that the same tactics that are supposed to scare people away from unhealthy food are actually encouraging them to buy it.

Photo: Ken Epstien, Heart Attack Grill

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 04, 2010 (boomark / email).