California Pizza Kitchen got a bit crusty when the chain learned a hot new LA pizzeria has a BBQ chicken pie on its menu it dared to call the “CPK.”
California Pizza Kitchen — which started in Beverly Hills in the ’80s and now has 131 locations in 27 states — sent Anna Pizza chef-owner Thomas DeSantis a letter asking him to change the name of his “CPK” pie or else CPK’s legal team would sink its teeth into a trademark infringement case.
DeSantis — originally from Queens — responded by defiantly removing the pizza from his menu and slamming California Pizza Kitchen’s letter face down into what he declared would be the final “CPK” dupe to come out of his oven. (The missive made for an unlikely topping!)
The California Pizza Kitchen letter, seen by Page Six Hollywood, started off by saying, “Word travels fast in the world of pizza, and your barbecue chicken creation has clearly been making waves. Frankly, we’re flattered.”
But, “when we heard that your menu features a barbecue chicken pizza lovingly referred to as the ‘CPK’ we had a moment. A proud moment. A nostalgic moment. A lightly legal moment,” the letter continues.
“You see, while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, trademark law is the least flexible form of friendship,” wrote California Pizza Kitchen. “And as much as we’d love to believe that ‘CPK’ now universally stands for ‘Culinary Pizza Kindredness,’ our attorneys (lovely people, truly, just not known for their sense of humor) insist that it still points rather specifically to us.”
View this post on Instagram 9 DeSantis is taking his CPK pie off the menu. Anna Pizza “Now, before anyone starts drafting anything with the words ‘cease’ or ‘desist’ in bold font, we thought we’d take a more… artisanal approach,” said the CPK letter before suggesting a few options to squash the proverbial beef, including Anna rebranding its BBQ chicken pizza without “CPK” and striking a “Great Pizza Peace Treaty.”
The (mildly) spicy letter closes by saying, “We mean none of this as a threat. Anyone putting real effort into real food deserves to keep doing exactly that. We just need to sort this out before our legal team starts feeling a sense of purpose, and nobody wants that. Let’s keep it friendly. Ideally over pizza. We’d love to resolve this in a way that keeps things friendly, collaborative, and — ideally — still delicious.”
In an Instagram video reply, DeSantis addressed the piping hot controversy by holding up the CPK letter and telling his fans, “We got an official cease-and-desist letter from California Pizza Kitchen because we named our BBQ chicken pizza the CPK, right?” He admitted, “A lot of our food on our menu that we ‘copied’ quote-unquote from other people — we want you to know we copied it right? So we named it after the [places] we copied it from. Hence, the ‘CPK.’” “It came from California Pizza Kitchen,” the pizza maestro added, holding up CPK’s special two-page delivery.
“They don’t like it,” DeSantis added of his homage (dough-mage?). “They’re not OK with it. They sent us this two-page letter about how to rectify it. So we’re going to rectify it right? They’re a little late. While it’s good, it’s outdated and no one orders it… so we’re going to take it off the menu. This is the last one we’re going to make… I’m going to eat it for lunch as a farewell, because I love this pizza. But it can no longer be on the menu.”
He also said: “They wanted us just to rename it, but we’re going to pull it off because it doesn’t sell. You guys are clearly over. We’re over it. California Pizza Kitchen’s over it. So to CPK, to your lawyers in Manhattan, here you go — it’s gone. It’s still a perfect pizza, we’re gonna throw it out though.”
He then slammed the letter into the sauce, saying, “There you go CPK, it’s off the menu. Love ya!”
Anna Pizza, named after DeSantis’ mom, will likely survive without the item on his menu: The LA Times wrote last month that fans are lining up at the Burbank Blvd. spot in Valley Village.
Anna’s CPK pizza was a $25 pie with “breaded chicken, BBQ sauce, sliced red onion, mozzarella with fresh cilantro,” while the California Pizza Kitchen version, at $22.45, includes “BBQ sauce, grilled chicken, smoked Gouda, red onions and fresh cilantro.”
Perhaps ironically, CPK was founded by former federal prosecutors Rick Rosenfield and Larry Flax.
Either way, another pie on Anna’s menu is called the “L’industrie,” which just happens to be the same name as NYC’s hottest pizza spot.
When we asked DeSantis for comment on the CPK controversy he said via email: “We don’t have the original letter lol as we ruined it for our video with BBQ sauce.”
