Restaurant goers may be a bit confused when they visit East State Street in Media.  Within 20 feet of each other stand two Dim Sum restaurants with nearly identical names, writes Max Marin for Billy Penn.

That name dispute has ended up in U.S. Eastern District Court.

Jintao “Tom” Guo is the namesake behind one of Chinatown’s more popular places for Shanghai-style soup dumplings.  Last month, he opened Tom’s Dim Sum Mania on East State Street in Media.

Just two doors down is Tom’s Dim Sum Media, an established offshoot of Tom’s Dim Sum on 11^th Street in Center City.

The owners of Tom’s Dim Sum Media allege their former associate opened the Mania version to deliberately mislead the public and “steal away” business from their well-established dining room. They claim Guo was never a partner and owned no rights to the name.

Guo claims his former partners used his recipes and his reputation to build their business, then forced him out, which is why he started his own shop next door.

Guo is one of the chefs known for sparking Philadelphia’s dumpling boom over the last decade.

Read more about the legal battle over the two restaurants here.

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