Fidel Gastro’s

That’s what she said.

The cheap sexual innuendo. The thing of beauty, grace, depth and length. Something that you can just slip in without fear of it blowing up in your face and once you start you can’t help but raise an eyebrow and smirk at everything mildly in-your-endo-y said at work.

‘I came across this document earlier’

‘Do you have any time this morning to fill me in?’

‘I’m not sure I can pull it off - it just looks too hard.’

I think she said all of that.

While doubling her entendre in the office must be rife I can’t imagine the number of opportunities of jamming one in when working in a restaurant or kitchen. The temptation must be huge given you are surrounded by choppers, big pieces of meat, stuffing birds, boning roasts, is this portion more than a mouthful, and if I write any more filth like this I’ll get fired so I’ll just stop there.

But while we are on the topic of eateries and given the El Bulli was voted best restaurant in the world with it’s ‘1 year in advance’ booking policy, and the Fat Duck came close second with their combined science ‘liquid nitrogen egg and bacon ice cream’ concoctions - I wanted to look at how my restaurant ‘Fidel Gastro’s’ would set itself apart from the Hakkasan’s and Claridges of this world and get number 1 next year.

1. Serve extremely marginal cuts of meat.

Enough with the current cowardly attempts at awful offal, rabbits’ ears, squirrel guts and half-pig’s heads in todays meateries. On the menu at Fidel’s, for breakfast, lunch and dinner I’ll be serving bits of animals that even they didn’t know they had. Gerbil tonsils, stoat anuses, cow lips and even vestigial tails will be offered in a variety of sauces and marinades while philtrums, perineums and prostates will be house specials on Wednesdays and Friday every week.

“I got to eat ice-cream for a week after the operation”

2. Get Real Mad Science

Heston can take his GCSE bunsen burner, litmus paper and test-tube set he got for Christmas and watch in awe as I go Doc Brown on the principles of molecular gastronomy. I’ll make chips cooked in a CERN borrowed particle accelerator which will burn holes in the plate, lamb curries with a radioactive half-life of 2 years, and ice-creams which are super-cooled to 0 Kelvin and have their own magnetic field. The specialty will be Schrödinger’s casserole which is served covered and is apparently both tasty and horrible at the same time until you take the lid off. And then it’s tasty as it costs £150 without side dishes or gratuity.

You have to cross the streams when making meringue.

3. Cook things that aren’t real.

In certain Chinatown dimsumeries you can eat steamed ‘Duck Tongues’. Do these even exist? Duck knows. Anyway Fidel Gastro’s will take this further and serve gastronomic creations based on fictional characters, all for equally made-up prices.

‘Waiter - what is the breakfast option?’
‘Today sir this is an omelet made with Yoshi eggs with fried 1-up mushrooms on the side’
‘um the Yoshi - is that like a quail?’
‘No - that is the small green dinosaur that Mario rides around while trying to save the Princess’
‘But - isn’t that just a video g….’
‘It costs £400′
‘I’ll take 2′

Recently decriminalised in MarioLand

4. Offer Pointless Sensory Experiences

Today you can dine in the dark with blind waiters serving your meal in pitch blackness to enhance your taste senses, a bit like Spider-man’s heightened sense of flies and waterspouts. Meanwhile Saturday night at Fidel’s is Descriptive Eating night. For £500 a head, you can get a seat at the top table and have your whole meal described to you by a part-time member of the American Amateur Dramatics Association of London. No smells will pass your nostrils nor food your lips yet the evening will be an aural pleasure dome to titillate your tinnitus-tormented earholes.

‘a succulent piece of wobbly pork belly is barely contained on the prongs on the fork as you admire it’s golden colour. You look closer. Is that a little curly hair you see resting on your next mouthful? Why yes - it’s one of Pedro the Puerto Rican sous-chefs pubes. Oh well - you eat it anyway yum yum mmmh tasty. SIKE DUDE, just kidding - he’s actually Mexican.’

“But the emperor is eating nothing at all!”

6. Ridiculous exclusivity

Patrick Bateman devoted his life to getting a table at the exclusive Dorsia and resorted to lying and chainsaws just to speak to the maître d’. Fidel’s door policy will be so stringent and the booking procedure so tangled and torturous even Lindsay Lohan doing a naked backwards crab walk wouldn’t get in.

Insert some generic Lindsay Lohan fire-crotch crabs joke.

To even get to speak to the automated phone menu you have to complete a modern day 12 labours of Hercules involving milking Camilla Parker-Bowles, acing Guitar Hero II on expert and licking your elbow, all completed 2 years in advance and even if you do get a table it will be the one outside next to the garbage cans and a loud American couple.

Why all this madness? At the end of the day I just want people, when asked ‘How the hell did you get a table at Fidel’s?’, to say…

‘It was the hardest thing I ever had to do’

and then I could respond.

‘That’s what she…’

I’ll stop there. I’m being totally childish now.