You can not “IP” a recipe.
This has already been decided, case will get tossed.

Well, if you read the court finding, the plaintiff fired the defendant, for unknown reasons; then the defendant turned around and started his own restaurant chain, poached employees; and sued for improper dismissal, which presumably means stuff like severance pay; then the plaintiff instituted a suit over intellectual property, etc. The trademark and Lanham suit seems like a more or less contrived case for purposes of retaliation. Probably, the trade secrets claims will prove to be equally specious, though those are questions of fact rather than law. What the former employer probably really resents is someone going through his restaurant managers, recruiting all the non-drunks, and leaving him with the residue.

The recipes will probably prove to be substantially similar to those found in published cookbooks. Chains are not very audacious– they don’t have the nerve to do something like a Indian Curry Pizza, or a Hungarian Goulash Pizza, or a Szetchuan Pizza. You know, do to a basic pizza, whatever the national cuisine would do to a dish of potatoes. To make an Italian dish into a French-style dish, use less oregano and rosemary, and more sage, savory, and thyme; replace tomatoes with grapes (*); and use swiss cheese (gruyere) instead of mozzarella, and finely-sliced ham instead of sausage. So, French Pizza. I remember actually eating a kind of pocket sandwich along those lines, sold by a Basque woman in a street market in Oregon. At any rate, this kind of thing is simply beyond a chain restaurant.

(*) Probably use a concoction made from pulverized grape pressings, which are a byproduct of juice/wine production. Pressings are commonly used to make brandy.

Chain pizza is not exactly distinctive in flavor, and it’s usually not very well cooked. It works out to giving an unskilled minimum wage counterman written directions to cook something for X minutes, while doing other work, rather than teaching him how to recognize when something is fully cooked. I looked up pizza in Adele Davis’s _Let’s Cook it Right_ (1947, 1962), and found an observation that you can manage the rising and moisture content of a pizza by pricking it every inch or so with a fork. Come to that, you can even design a special fork with, say, a hundred extremely sharp prongs and a long enough handle to be capable of reaching into the oven. Such a fork is not patentable or a legitimate trade secret– it is immediately obvious over Adele Davis’s advice.

In a neighboring field, McDonald’s actually did create, circa 1970, an instrument which could measure the extent to which french fries were cooked, and ring a buzzer, or cause the fry basket to be lifted out of the fryer. There is no mention of any such instrument in this case.

Pizzas and french fries are commercially salable because the need for the special cooking apparatus, a pizza oven or a deep-fat frying, make them fairly difficult to make at home. Stew, and various cognate dishes such as chili, can be cooked, and frozen, and thawed out in a microwave oven. The basic test of freezability is whether the dish admits of being stirred together to equalize thawing/cooking/heating. People buy quantities of frozen entrees in the supermarket, and store them in the freezer. Big chain restaurants don’t seem to be able to cook this kind of thing well enough to be able to break into the market at necessarily much higher prices.

In the real world, recipes are not what chain pizza outlets compete on. I’ve got a local Menu Guide, which I picked up out of a box someone left in the laundry room. The chain pizza outlets are conspicuous for their absence, and the same goes for the display ads in the yellow pages. The chain pizza people decided in effect that they couldn’t compete in what amounted to a virtual food court. What the chains do is to advertise by junk mail, and a characteristic way of spending money is to attach the advertisement to one of those rubber magnets, in the hope that it will get stuck to the refrigerator, instead of getting thrown out with the trash. Chain pizza outlets seem to be very big on discount coupons. I suppose, nowadays, there are these Iphone apps. The whole point of the exercise is to get a sale by virtue of the customer not knowing how to contact the competition.

I actually chose an owner-operated pizza parlor on the basis of its being 1500 feet away, and there being a good chance of the food arriving while it’s still hot. I went in, got a take-out order of salads, talked to the people, got a menu, and wound up actually placing a delivery order when I was snowbound.