Tiny Restaurant Loses Identity in Legal Jungle

Sounds of the rain forest:

Caw! Cackle! Chee-chee-chee! Waha-waha! Hoopa-hoopa! Cease-and-desist!

That last one is why a little Bolivian restaurant in Camarillo is no longer called Rain Forest Delights.

Now it’s Selva Andina Delights.

Same terrific empanadas. Same charming cook. But as of last week, a different name--thanks to the vine-swinging, chest-beating call of trademark attorneys the world over: Cease-and-desist! Cease-and-desist!

Maria Way ceased and desisted and learned a sad truth about the restaurant business: When it comes to rain forests, it’s a jungle out there.

Maria and her husband, Jim, dipped deep into their savings and opened--dare I say it?--Rain Forest Delights in 1998.

“I’d dreamed about having a restaurant since I came to Camarillo 12 years ago,” she said. “I was just driving and looking around, and this place seemed perfect.”

Maria grew up in Bolivia. In her hometown of Santa Cruz, her aunt runs a restaurant where each day she sells 2,000 empanadas--tasty turnovers stuffed with meat and vegetables.

“Here, I sell maybe 40, if I’m lucky,” Maria said.

Even so, the place has built a following. People attending movies at the Paseo Camarillo cinemas a few doors away stop in for a post-film bite. Spanish teachers send their students over for a taste of South American cuisine muy autentico. With the help of her husband and her two teenage daughters in the kitchen, Maria was building a nice business.

Then came The Letter, on stationery dripping with more attorneys’ names than there are parrots along the Amazon.

It seemed that Maria’s Rain Forest Delights had drawn the attention of Rainforest Cafe Inc., an international chain of gimmicky theme restaurants based in Minneapolis.

“Our client is the owner of an incontestable federal service mark registration for ‘RAINFOREST,’ Registration No. 1,125,440, registered Sept. 25, 1979, for restaurant services,” The Letter said. It went on to demand that Rain Forest Delights call itself something else, to avoid confusion among customers.

Maria did what anyone would do with The Letter. She certainly did what I would do.

“I ignored it,” she said. “I hoped it would go away.”

Of course, it didn’t. More letters arrived.

Eventually, a lawyer friend shot off a caustic response to the attorneys for Rainforest Cafe Inc.

“If you or your clients have successfully litigated this matter against some other little person somewhere else who opened a little restaurant and in her immigrant naivete did not consult an intellectual property service to have the proposed restaurant name researched, please advise,” wrote attorney Ken Weston.

Unmoved, the firm persisted, and Jim and Maria started to worry.

Lawyers told them they would lose in court with the testimony of just one person who thought their 10-table eatery was linked to the massive Rainforest Cafes which offer such atmospheric perks as waterfalls, giant salt-water aquariums and a ‘fiber-optic starscape.”

The couple weren’t encouraged when an acquaintance who knew nothing of their trademark problem suddenly asked: “Say, is your place related to that Rainforest Cafe down in Costa Mesa?”

“Jim just looked at me,” Maria recalled.

In short order, they gave Rain Forest Delights a more mellifluous, evocative, indigenous name.

“Selva Andina,” Maria repeats with a subversive wink. “It means rain forest of the Andes.”

The chain agreed to give the Ways $1,900--about half the cost of a new sign, business cards, menus and the rest of it.

So now Maria dishes up the empanadas and bolillos of her native land at Selva Andina Delights.

Meanwhile, in mega-malls throughout the U.S., 27 Rainforest Cafes churn out specialties like Rumble in the Jungle Turkey Pita, Paradise Pot Roast and a dessert that should make trademark attorneys everywhere salivate: Gorillas in the Mist Banana Cheesecake.

The chain is planning restaurants at Disneyland and in San Francisco and has 10 in foreign countries.

I wondered: Are there any Rainforest Cafes in the rain forest?

Not a chance, laughed Stephen Cohen, the company’s chief attorney. “There’s just too much real-life competition there,” he said.

Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.