A Spanish restaurant group that never planted a single table on US soil just forced a Myrtle Beach operator to keep defending the name it copied.
On September 2, 2026, U.S. District Judge Joseph Dawson III largely denied Poky’s LLC’s motion for judgment on the pleadings. Honest Greens Barcelona SAU’s federal false-association, cybersquatting, and South Carolina common-law trademark claims survive. The case, filed in December 2024, stays alive.
Honest Greens Barcelona has run roughly thirty locations across Spain and Portugal since 2017 under the HONEST GREENS brand and a family of HONEST-formative marks. It holds worldwide registrations and has publicly talked about US expansion. Its website draws tens of thousands of American IP visits a year. Its Instagram account sits north of 270,000 followers, nearly 8,000 of them US-based. American tourists already know the name.
Poky’s LLC incorporated in South Carolina in October 2022. Within weeks it filed a US trademark application for HONEST GREENS. An associate registered honestgreens.us. An Instagram handle @honestgreens.us appeared. In late 2023 the Myrtle Beach restaurant opened under the identical name and the same healthy, fast, affordable pitch. Local media covered the launch. Customers who knew the Spanish original started asking the Barcelona company whether the South Carolina spot was theirs.
The marks are not similar. They are the same. Same words. Same services. Same marketing channels. The junior user simply added a .us domain and kept going.
That is the crime-scene photograph. A foreign brand with real US recognition and expansion plans watches a domestic operator plant an identical flag on a busy coastal highway. The opposition window on the US applications has already been fought. The civil action is now the expensive phase. Inventory, signage, menus, social accounts, and years of local goodwill sit under injunction risk. Rebrand costs arrive whether or not the junior user ever intended to copy.
The Cheap Moment Is Already Gone
Trademark offices do not automatically police relative grounds. Confusing similarity is the owner’s problem. Opposition windows are short—often thirty to ninety days after publication. Once the mark registers or the junior user opens the doors, the fight moves to court and the meter runs at litigation rates.
Failure to watch lookalikes is how rights weaken. Dilution starts quietly. Customers mix the two sources. Expansion plans hit a wall of prior local use. Due-diligence teams later ask why the brand let a twin grow unchallenged.
Exact copies remain rare. The real damage arrives in one-letter shifts, phonetic twins, mascot cousins, and packaging that feels familiar at a glance. Watching the register is cheaper than a roadside rebrand. That is why monitoring exists and what happens if you wait.
The salad name was already someone else’s problem before the Myrtle Beach lights came on. The only cheap moment is before the lookalike hardens.