And yes, there are email servers involved. Much of the suit is based on a forensic search of emails that it says showed Mr. Kimball’s scrambling to set up his new business before he left the old one, securing copies of his work contacts and packing up his belongings. “Want to get ahead of the partners!” he wrote to his assistant, whose emails show that she used the America’s Test Kitchen name to search for office space for his new venture.
The suit, filed in Suffolk County (Mass.) Superior Court, contends that Mr. Kimball and his team copied the America’s Test Kitchen style and business model right down to how recipes are written, and did some of their work on Milk Street while still employed by America’s Test Kitchen.
“At least 15 former and current ATK employees and freelancers now work for Milk Street,” states the lawsuit, whose filing was reported Monday by The Boston Globe. “This case is not about legitimate competition — it is about a profoundly disloyal fiduciary.”
Jack Bishop, the chief creative officer at America’s Test Kitchen, said, “We were taking the quiet, private ‘Let’s try to make this work’ approach, and this is where we have now ended up.”
Document
Read the complaint filed in Suffolk County Superior Court in Massachusetts.
He and Mr. Kimball have known each other since 1987, six years before Mr. Kimball started Cook’s Illustrated, the ad-free magazine that ushered in a new approach to cooking journalism and grew to become America’s Test Kitchen. Mr. Kimball, 65, and the company parted ways last year.
“There is no joy in any of this,” Mr. Bishop said. “Other than my siblings and parents, it is one of the longer relationships I’ve had in my life.”
Mr. Kimball called the lawsuit “absurd,” saying the filing was meant to generate publicity and to shore up the America’s Test Kitchen brand.
“I want to respond carefully to everything factually,” he said. “If I start getting into the details, it’s just going to be a pissing contest. I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.”
At issue are both Mr. Kimball’s fiduciary responsibility to a company in which he and his former wife and children still hold shares, and trickier questions about the creative core of an empire that grew to include TV and radio shows, several successful books, paid websites and Cook’s Country magazine.
The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages, repayment of some of the compensation that America’s Test Kitchen paid Mr. Kimball and the people who left with him, and asks the court to prevent him and his new company “from exploiting information, assets and opportunities stolen from America’s Test Kitchen.”
The marriage between Mr. Kimball and America’s Test Kitchen started to crumble in 2013, when it became clear that the board and investors wanted him to begin planning for a successor. The company, which was on track to employ more than 200 people, sought to expand its digital reach.
Although Mr. Kimball — always the star and a key creative force of the franchise — agreed, he said it soon became clear that he was being pushed out. The suit puts it this way: “Mr. Kimball secretly resented giving up any control of the business.”
By 2015, the board of Boston Common Press, which owns America’s Test Kitchen, had hired a new chief executive who outranked Mr. Kimball but said he wanted him to stay on in a leadership role and as the face of America’s Test Kitchen. He could even take time to write books.
Mr. Kimball eventually stopped coming to the office, telling people there he had been fired. It was a brutal few months of battle, especially for the Kimball loyalists who would eventually leave with him to start Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, a cooking school, magazine, TV and radio enterprise that has a more global focus than America’s Test Kitchen.
The new venture is named after the street in Boston’s financial district where Mr. Kimball has rented 8,000 square feet of the ground floor of the Flour & Grain Exchange building for his offices and studio. Initially called Milk Street Kitchen, the new venture was sued last summer by the owner of nearby Milk Street Cafe, who claimed the original name had hurt his business.
Mr. Kimball won the early rounds of the trademark battle. The lawyer for the cafe owner is now representing America’s Test Kitchen in the new suit.
Although Mr. Kimball has said all along that he has been careful to present Milk Street as a new endeavor, the suit says that it is so close to his old one that the public is confused. Even the consumer-driven name of the Facebook fan page for America’s Test Kitchen includes Milk Street. Journalists who have written about the new magazine have noted similarities.
But Adam Rapoport, editor in chief of Bon Appétit, said Mr. Kimball can only be himself.
“If you are a creative person who has done one thing, you do what you do,” Mr. Rapoport said, noting that he was not speaking about the legal issues raised in the lawsuit. “Anthony Bourdain went from the Travel Channel to CNN, and he still did Bourdain. I don’t think it’s really possible to change.”
Mr. Kimball, in an interview Wednesday, cautioned not to read too much into the allegations, saying most were false or twisted interpretations. He was upset that personal information had been made public in the original filing, including his home address and details about his finances, which include just over $1 million he received in salary and bonuses in 2015. In all, Mr. Kimball has made more than $30 million in distributions as a partner, according to the court documents.
He and his legal team are preparing a response, which is due to the court this month. Otherwise, he’s turning his attention elsewhere.
“Thanksgiving’s coming up,” he said. “I’d like to actually focus on that and Milk Street and everything else we are doing. That’s what’s important.”
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