The owners of Call Your Mother, a chain of “Jew-ish” delis that started in Washington, recently made a call of their own — to a lawyer.
The chain this week filed a trademark-infringement lawsuit against a bagel shop in Long Branch, New Jersey, that uses the name Call Your Bubbi. (Bubbi, commonly spelled “bubbe,” is a Yiddish term for “grandmother”.) The complaint claims that the New Jersey establishment’s name could confuse customers who might think the businesses were related, and could harm Call Your Mother’s reputation and brand.
Andrew Dana, who co-owns Call Your Mother and Timber Pizza Co. with his wife, Daniela Moreira, saw the alleged confusion firsthand. In an interview, he said he first heard about the New Jersey cafe, which opened last year, when neighbors of theirs who were traveling spotted it and texted to see if Call Your Mother was expanding to the Garden State. “So I checked their website and Instagram, and I saw the similarities,” Dana said.
Call Your Mother’s logo consists of a round image with the lettering circling a rotary telephone dial. Call Your Bubbi, which also uses Bubbi Bagels branding, has used a round image with its lettering around a bagel in its branding, including on its front door, according to the shop’s online images.
Dana said he tried unsuccessfully to reach the owner of Call Your Bubbi for several months. At one point, he noticed that the shop had a line on its website that said “If Mom says ‘no’, Call Your Bubbi.” “I just felt like they were goading us,” he said.
Eventually, he and Moreira decided to take a legal route, and their lawyer sent a cease-and-desist letter in August, and eventually filed the lawsuit. “We’re not trying to restrict anybody’s business,” Dana said. “I just hope we come to a conclusion as fast as possible.”
The New Jersey bagel shop goes by the name Call Your Bubbi in various contexts, such as on Yelp and the vendor directory of the retail and resort complex where it is located. Multiple calls to the owner, David Mizrahi, and to the deli seeking comment were not returned.
The lawsuit notes that Call Your Mother, which opened its first location in 2018 and now has 18 outposts in D.C., Maryland, Virginia and Colorado, holds registered trademarks of its name and logo in connection with coffee, deli and restaurant services.
“‘CALL YOUR BUBBI’ is confusingly similar in appearance, sound, cadence, structure, meaning, and overall commercial impression to the CALL YOUR MOTHER,” the lawsuit states. “Both phrases begin with the identical imperative wording ‘CALL YOUR,’ and each concludes with a familial referent that conveys a similar connotation, evoking the same distinctive, memorable, and source-identifying impression in the marketplace.”
The complaint also claims that the terms “mother” and “bubbi” carry similar connotations of a Jewish matriarch.
“For Jewish delis — whose brand narratives often center on tradition, comfort, and family recipes — both marks evoke the same core idea — a warm and loving (but also somewhat instructive or scolding) prompt to call your mother or grandmother, and to grab some coffee and bagels while you are at it,” the filing claims.
The lawsuit seeks to stop the New Jersey deli from using the moniker and asks for an award to cover Call Your Mother’s attorney fees as well as unspecified damages.
In 2022, an established Dallas restaurant called Carbone’s sued the then-new Dallas outpost of the well-known Italian restaurant Carbone. The restaurants eventually settled the matter under undisclosed terms, and the older restaurant changed its name to Barsotti’s Fine Foods & Liqueurs. In 2017, Celebrity chef Marc Murphy, who at the time operated two New York bistros called Landmarc, successfully sued to prevent a restaurant group from opening what was set to be called the Landmark Rooms in the Four Seasons hotel in Manhattan.
Dana says he isn’t sure what the outcome of his lawsuit will be. “I make bagels and pizza for a living,” he said. “I have no idea how this works.”
Mizrahi, the Bubbi Bagels owner, did answer a call from a Post reporter, but the call was unexpectedly cut off. Follow-up calls were not answered. Dana said that when he attempted to contact the owner initially, “He hung up on me.”
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