Dianne de Guzman is the regional editor for Eater’s Northern California/Pacific Northwest sites, writing about restaurant and bar trends, upcoming openings, and pop-ups for the San Francisco Bay Area, Portland, Seattle, and Denver.
Spanish restaurant Macarena isn’t even open yet, and already the owners are embroiled in a lawsuit in which they are accused of stealing recipes, along with the customer and client data of another Bay Area restaurant, the Mercury News reports.
David Linares and Elisabet Reviriego, the couple behind Macarena, were both former employees of the restaurant group Telefèric Barcelona, which operates Spanish restaurants in the Bay Area, Southern California, and Spain by the same name. In a lawsuit filed on December 5, 2024, Telefèric alleges that on his last day of employment, Linares downloaded 17,000 files from a confidential, shared Google Drive containing recipes, food providers, financial and budgetary information, marketing strategies, leasing agreements, and the restaurant’s “events price bible,” which includes “strategy for hosting events, catering, and pricing details, among others,” the lawsuit states…