Louis Vuitton has won a lawsuit in South Korea, where, for the last several months, it has been in a courtroom tango with a restaurant owner accused of use the company’s name to sell fried chicken, Agence France-Presse reports. A judge has penalized the owner $12,500 for refusing to comply with an earlier order to stop using the luxury brand name and printing a similar logo on his napkins and takeaway cartons.
The man’s Seoul restaurant had originally been called “LOUIS VUITON DAK,” which is a play on a word that means “whole chicken” in Korean. He then changed it to “chaLouisvuitondak.” That didn’t satisfy Louis Vuitton, which complained that the name sounded almost identical and that the association with fried chicken was damaging to its brand.
To be sure, this isn’t the first time a big-name luxury brand has gone after a restaurant for its name.
The Rolex Deli in Brooklyn was sued by the luxury timepiece company in 2011 for attaching its name to its shop. It was sued again two years later after renamed itself Roll-x Deli. In 2014, luxury jeweler Faberge took issue with a restaurant—also in Brooklyn—called the Faberge Restaurant and Lounge. That place not only used the jeweler’s name, but also tried to mimic its storefront style.