7IF YOU'VE EVER HAD A DREAM SO REAL that you didn't know whether you were awake or still sleeping, this story will strike an instant chord. For this is the memoir of an ordinary, middle-class couple who lived that dream - of starting their own restaurant which cut a starry swathe across Greater Manchester in the late Eighties. And then woke up in the middle of the greatest conjuring trick on the planet.It was a tempestuous decade of acid house rock bands like The Smiths, New Order, Happy Mondays, and TV newsreader superstars like Tony Wilson that propelled Cottonopolis Manchester to centre stage worldwide. And nothing epitomised those tumultuous times more than Cafe Josie, an outrageously themed magic restaurant that lit up the cultural life of all who dined there at the end of the MADchester Universe. It helped that Cafe Josie was 10 years ahead of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential expose of the raw underbelly of the restaurant business. And this wasn't the Big Apple, but Manchester, UK. Cafe Josie was the kind of a fantasy diner that didn't exist anywhere on this sceptred isle. But with no professional expertise, its prime movers conjured it into existence with scarcely an abracadabra to help them on the way.Taking Jane Austen's advice, Josie embroiders her narrative with a phantasmagoria of framing devices that shrieks written witchcraft words never before seen in a work of non-fiction. And in a freewheeling narrative, she conjures up a galaxy of strange phenomena to counterpoint her tale of the phalanx of table-top magicians who dazzled diners. But as suddenly as Cafe Josie had opened its doors, it vanished without trace. For the thousands of regular patrons who've never recovered from the shock, and the tens of thousands of others who failed to book a table, this is the inside story of how one couple's dream changed the dining out experience forever. And how an elephant in the room called time on a catering odyssey. Quite how and and why this pale grey shadow bamboozled two beautiful dreamers is the subject of this precautionary tale. And provides a paradigm warning to all those thousands of other wannabe restaurateurs out there - maybe this is not the way to do it! With or without sleight-of-hand.Are you watching closely . . .