Photo courtesy dailymail.co.ukI have this friend, Jesse. Jesse owns a lot of restaurants and, like me, likes to have a cocktail now and then. One night back in Denver, me and Jesse and another friend, Westword music editor Dave Herrera, were out totally behaving ourselves on a Saturday night, not doing anything at all that would embarrass our mothers if they heard about it, and after a few hours, conversation turned to the opening of restaurants.”I could open ANY restaurant,” Jesse insisted, aiming the neck of a bottle of mezcal chocolate milk at Dave and me, “serving anything, and it would have a wait on a Friday night, one month out.”Jesse is prone to grand exaggerations like this. He is a proud and wickedly successful restaurateur who honestly believes he can do no wrong–a trait which is actually more amusing than it sounds. He also gets a bit boastful once he gets a measure of chocolate milk in him.”Really, Jesse?” I asked. “Any kind of restaurant?””Yes.”Dave grinned. “And it’ll have a line on a Friday night, 30 days after opening?””Yes.””You want to bet on that?” I asked.For a second or two, Jesse thought about it. Then he got a very serious look on his face. “Yes,” he said. “Yes I do.”So we made a bet: Dave and I would get to choose the kind of restaurant and Jesse would have to open it and have a wait on a Friday night, one month out. The stakes were . . . well, I don’t actually remember the stakes. I’d had a fair amount of chocolate milk myself. But I do recall that if Dave and I lost, we would have to do a commercial for Jesse’s restaurant group that involved us sitting naked on lawn chairs talking about how awesome they were while the TV cameras rolled. I also remember that there was literally NO CHANCE IN HELL that Dave and I were going to lose, because the kind of restaurant we’d chosen for Jesse?A restaurant where no one ate anything, but paid only to smell their food. A smell restaurant. And I think he had to call it Stinky’s.Needless to say, Jesse never opened his smell restaurant. Never paid up on the bet either (mostly because neither Dave or I could remember what we’d demanded on our end of the bargain). And for years, we made jokes back and forth about Jesse’s smell restaurant. And then today, I see this:”My head is suspended over a goldfish bowl. A glass straw is between my lips. Clouds of smoke are wafting into my face and lemon tart swirls around my mouth.Only it’s not a big slab of calorific lemon tart spooned up from a plate. This is ‘breathable’ lemon tart.”That’s from a story in today’s Daily Mail about the new “Le Whaf” machines being debuted in Paris–futury-looking goldfish bowls which provide customers with inhalable versions of their favorite foods.And no, I am not making this up. Check it out:The machine is the invention of David Edwards, a Harvard professor, inventor and founder of Le Laboratoire, and he swears that his magical fishbowl of vaporized foodstuffs will be going on sale in France this autumn and will, in short order, change the world.From the Daily Mail again:”[Edwards is] brimming with ideas to make this catch on. ‘Imagine a restaurant where, instead of sitting at a table, you walk around,’ he says in his ­chalky-soft voice. ‘Instead of eating food, you’re breathing it in as you walk from room to room, each with a ­different flavour. Celery in one. Steak in another. Then pate.'”Yes. It’s a smell restaurant–exactly the kind that Dave and I bet Jesse he would never be able to create. Apparently we were all just a little bit ahead of our time. But then, drinking enough chocolate milk will do that to a fella from time to time–unstick him from his current place in the time stream and bounce him around a little.Right now, there are only two Le Whaf machines in the entire world, but seeing as Edwards is also the inventor of Le Whif (a kind of asthma inhaler that can be filled with a one-shot dose of chocolate or coffee) and there were something like 200,000 Le Whifs sold last year to dieters or people who just really need to get that wakey-juice into their systems fast, I’m not so quick to doubt him as I was Jesse. Or at least I won’t be going out of my way to bet him that he can’t do it.For more information on Le Whaf, how it works, how Edwards thought of it (hint: He was drunk, too), and what an inhaled lemon tart tastes like, check out the full Daily Mail story right here. And for another look at Edwards and his inventions, just bop over to the Le Laboratoire website over here.