Family Feast Farce

One of the country's remotest pubs has been accused by international fast food giant Kentucky Fried Chicken of pirating one of its meals.

Licensee Tracy Daly thought she was the victim of a late April Fools Day joke when a letter from top London law firm Freshfields arrived at the Tan Hill Inn, which at 1,732 foot above sea level in the Pennines is England's highest pub.
The note, signed by a Giles Pratt, claimed their use of the name 'Family Feast' on their menu breached KFC registered trademark for their own bucket of chicken, chips and extras.

"I just thought 'It can't be real', " said Ms Daly, 40, who runs the pub 20 miles from Richmond in North Yorkshire, with her partner Mike Pearce, 60.

"We are miles away from the nearest High Street, and the name on the letter made me wonder, so I rang up the solicitors offices in Fleet Street to check. At first Mr Pratt didn't know what I was talking about. Only when I gave him a reference number did he find the correspondence. But then he warned me to take the matter very seriously. I told him to look at our website. We and KFC are worlds apart in the food business. We are not in the High Street we are so remote we are just a speck on the landscape. But he was so serious that in the end I had to put the phone down....

"It beggars belief, I am dumbfounded. They are a multi-million pound, international organisation and I am a little lady up a mountain. I don't like bullies and I think they want to bully me. They have turned heavy-duty, big-city lawyers loose on us, but I have already had to firms of solicitors offering to take on our case for nothing. We will have to consider what we do, but we just hope KFC will realise they have been a bit silly and just let it drop. Perhaps we should apolgise on our website for threatening their business."

The Tan Inn's Family Feast appears on the pub menu only once a year on Christmas Day.

"I don't know how KFC got to hear about it, although it is on our website" said Ms Daly. "It's a traditional Christmas dinner: pate, turkey, road beef and the trimmings, Christmas pud. It about as similar to a KFC meal as chalk is to cheese. We do have chicken and chips with a salad on the menu, but we use local free-range birds - no coating, no secret spices. I could understand if we had set out to rip off what they do, but this is worlds away."

A spokesperson for KFC GB said: "Family Feast is a registered trade mark of Kentucky Fried Chicken (Great Britain) Limited. KFC devotes significant resources to promoting and protecting its trade marks. This particular instance is being dealt with by our solicitors."