It's not in many restaurants that you need to have security clearance before placing your order.
But food lovers in Cardiff will have to do just that if they want to dine at a planned new restaurant - it will be in a prison and will be run by offenders.
If given the go-ahead by planners, HMP Cardiff fine-dining eaterie will be set up by the Clink Charity to help prisoners gain qualifications.
Diners will be searched before being cooked for and served by the inmates.
They will also have to submit an inquiry form when booking a table, which is then vetted by security, and have to bring photographic identification and hand over their mobile phones when arriving at the restaurant.
The aim of the Clink Charity, which was started by professional chef Alberto Crisci, is to reduce re-offending rates of ex-offenders by training and placing graduates upon their release into the hospitality industry.
It already runs a Clink restaurant in Sutton, Surrey and is looking for sites for new prison restaurants.
Cardiff council's planning committee has received an application to turn the jail's former visitor centre - a detached building within the prison boundary - into a restaurant.
Prisoners would work in the restaurant as cooks, waiters and cleaners, gaining City and Guilds, NVQ's and BIC's qualifications.
They will serve three course meals of fresh Welsh produce grown at an organic farm at HMP Prescoed in Usk, Monmouthshire.
Tables, chairs and other items of furniture used in the dining room will be manufactured by prisoners and they will also contribute poetry and art for the walls.
The only real difference compared to more normal restaurants is that alcohol will be off the menu and the cutlery will be plastic.
The planning application said that the plan "aims to provide a genuine opportunity for re training and life changing skill sets to offenders".
"The Clink offers prisoners the chance to gain food preparation, front of house service and cleaning qualifications," it added.
"Also, it provides first hand valuable experience within an exciting, dynamic business environment."
It said that the reoffending rate in the first year of release from prison is estimated to be around 50%.
But Clink has reduced this reoffending rate amongst its graduates to 20%.
The first Clink restaurant in Sutton three years ago within the walls of HMP High Down has so far trained 85 prisoners.
A Prison Service spokesperson said: "Prisons should be places of hard work that address the root causes of offending behaviour and where prisoners pay their debt to society.
"Skills learned through schemes like this increase the likelihood of prisoners getting a job on release - which reduces the chances of them reoffending - and allows deductions from their wages to be used for victims' services."
Cardiff Prison is a category B local / training prison - for those who do not require maximum security, but for whom escape needs to be made very difficult - and has a capacity for over 780 male adult prisoners.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-sout ... s-17028146
Porrige
Porrige
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
Re: Porrige
You might want to fix the typo in the title before BSG goes into meltdown mate... 
Why is it that when Miley Cyrus gets naked and licks a hammer it's 'art' and 'edgy' but when I do it I'm 'drunk' and 'banned from the hardware store'?
Re: Porrige
nah...
lets see....
lets see....
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
Re: Porrige
On your head be it...
Why is it that when Miley Cyrus gets naked and licks a hammer it's 'art' and 'edgy' but when I do it I'm 'drunk' and 'banned from the hardware store'?
Re: Porrige
Bwahahahahaha!Sean wrote:You might want to fix the typo in the title before BSG goes into meltdown mate...
I opened this thread planning to bitch about that!
Piss off!
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan
~ Carl Sagan
Re: Porrige
Sounds like the new wacko thriller on Fox; Alcatraz
...beware of migrating polar bears.
On March 21, 1963, over three hundred inmates and more than forty guards disappeared from the Alcatraz island prison without a trace. To cover up the disappearance, the government invented a cover story about the prison being closed, due to unsafe conditions, and the inmates were transferred. As a young guard in 1963, federal agent Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill) had been one of the first to discover the inmates missing. He now runs a secret government unit dedicated to finding the prisoners. In present-day San Francisco, the "63s" (as the inmates and guards are called) begin returning, having not aged at all. To help track them down and capture them, Hauser enlists police detective Rebecca Madsen (Sarah Jones) and doctor Diego Soto (Jorge Garcia), an expert on the history of Alcatraz. The 63s appear to be returning without memory of where they have been and with compulsions to find certain objects.
...beware of migrating polar bears.
Re: Porrige
Now, now......one must be gentle with the folk down under.bigskygal wrote:Bwahahahahaha!Sean wrote:You might want to fix the typo in the title before BSG goes into meltdown mate...
I opened this thread planning to bitch about that!
Piss off!
NOT!
Your collective inability to acknowledge this obvious truth makes you all look like fools.
yrs,
rubato
