To most people, food is food - the egg tarts from Diner A are probably no different from the ones at Diner B.
But all decent chefs regard their dishes as the original and the best, although they may all be slaving away over the same menu.
This professional pride sometimes goes to the extent of actually patenting a dish, and Chen Sic-rong, a chef from Jingjiang in Jiangsu province has done exactly that with his tong bao, or soup bag dumpling.
Tong bao is a dumpling sold all over China with skin wrapping meat (and often crab roe) and soup. Sometimes you need a straw to suck up the soup before you savour the dumpling. So what is so special about Chen's tong bao?
CitySeen contacted the Ye Shanghai restaurant which has invited Chen to make the dumplings next week. 'Chen's tong bao is the original tong bao, as it has thin yet tough skin and there is crab roe and meat inside it,' a spokesman for the restaurant said. 'The soup will not leak even though you take the dumpling with your hand.'
But will patenting the dish work? Several years ago the city of Yangzhou patented the recipe of its Yangzhou fried rice - the most famous fried rice in Hong Kong. It stirred debate, but in the end no chef in Hong Kong cared and kept frying Yangzhou rice in their own way. Hopefully Chen's dumplings won't get the same treatment.