Dave Gahan to open restaurant? Not really

Since a few days there is a rumour being spread on purpose on the net that Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode would have plans to open a restaurant called 'The Bitter Apple' in New York (also the title of a song that can be found on the Dave Gahan solo album "Paper Monsters"). The leak is obviously there in order to use it for an April 1ste 'joke' so it seems. If you check thebitterapple.com you'd indeed could believe it to be true. So, just for the fun, we started checking a few things and we quickly saw that the site had only been registered on March 18th 2007 by the official webmaster of Depeche Mode, rather late if you want to open a serious business on June 7th. Add to this a framed poster of the "Violator" cover on one of the pictures of the restaurant and it all gets a bit too cheesy to be true. The description of the restaurant below is not exactly credible either:

"Taking over the restaurant site formerly known as Poetessa (editor's note: a now closed Italian pizzahut-like restaurant that has been renamed Candela Candela), the bitter apple promises to be one of the cooler restaurants in the NYC area. With a small sound stage in the back of the restaurant, owner Dave Gahan promises to 'have the joint rocking (...)'"

And to give it a completely surreal touch the 'opening night entertainment' would be - and here it actually gets funny - Guest DJ sets from Martin Gore and Andrew Fletcher with tickets for the event to be made available later (on April 1st?) via the official DM website.

But... it got less funny when we contacted Opentable.com, which is supposedly going to take the online orders for the restaurant so the Gahan resto site says. The company denied having anything to do with the so-called new restaurant and was far from happy that its name was being (ab)used for a prank. We were asked to hand over all info to their legal department to have a look at it... Oooops, that was probably not the intention of the joke...

(Update: An hour after this newspiece was posted on Side-Line and started getting spread around, the page on the Dave Gahan resto site was altered and the name of Opentable.com was removed.)

But the problems seem just to have started for real now as several fans who 'bought' the joke actually also bought planetickets to be sure to get access to the 'event' with or without an invitation. Several victims of this not so clever idea now think about asking the aid of a laywer in a way to recoupe the costs made. To be continued.

There is also a fake "Volume 2" site for the 'best of Depeche Mode' compilation that will probably be used closer to April 1. Let's see if there is any joke left for April Fools day itself.
Dave Gahan CDs
Depeche Mode CDs