Good night, and good lick: what can we expect from George Clooney’s restaurant?

The Provençal village of Cotignac is not wanting for places to eat. Within a short drive of its pale stone houses, you can find a wealth of high-end dining options. La Table de Mentone, set within the beautiful Château Mentone wine estate, is famed for the produce it grows on site. The Michelin-starred Restaurant Bruno offers dazzling variations of truffle dishes. More locally, Picotte Provence offers the sort of charming village dining that showcases the best of what the region has to offer.

However, despite all these wonderful options, there is one thing that Cotignac does not yet boast, and that’s a celebrity vanity project. But that is all about to change, thanks to the news that George Clooney is planning to open a restaurant there.

According to reports, Clooney, who lives locally, is keen to open a restaurant in partnership with the Canadian owner of a nearby hotel, with an elegant dining room and an outdoor terrace. No formal application has been submitted, but it is thought that the restaurant will open next year.

Some aspects of this make more sense than others. After all, Clooney and his family have been French citizens since December, so it would make perfect sense for him to want to lay deeper roots within the community. In fact Clooney is so French that he turns up for the only memorable scene in the recent Call My Agent! movie.

Clooney and his wife, Amal, have been French citizens since December. Photograph: Earl Gibson III/Deadline/Getty Images

However, it has also been reported that Clooney’s proposed restaurant would be Italian, which seems a little odd given that Provence is one of the major food capitals of the world. Becoming a citizen of one country and then immediately building a temple to the food of the last place you lived in could be seen as a little vulgar.

But only a fool would rule Clooney out here. This is a man with a habit of making a success of himself whenever he turns his hand to something new. His tequila company was so successful that not only did he sell it for $1bn but now you can’t walk into a supermarket without tripping over a dozen alcoholic drink brands created by performers desperately hoping that it will make them enough money to stop acting.

In fact, Clooney’s tequila money is probably his saving grace here. He could sink hundreds of millions of euros into this new restaurant and, even if it ended up being a disaster, he would still be abnormally well insulated for the rest of his life. And that is probably a good thing because, when it comes to restaurants, Hollywood figures don’t tend to have the best reputation.

The true successes, such as Robert De Niro’s Nobu, are few and far between. More often than not, these things tend to end in disaster. For instance, when Hulk Hogan decided to dip his toe into hospitality in the mid-1990s, the venture lasted less than a year. Admittedly this is because it was a pasta restaurant inside a shopping mall, and all the pasta was shaped like Hulk Hogan, and the place was called Pastamania, and it had an exclamation mark on the end, which meant you couldn’t say it aloud without sounding either angry or scared, but the point still stands.

Not wanting for places to eat … the Provençal village of Cotignac. Photograph: David Gabis/Alamy

There are so many others. In 2002 Jennifer Lopez opened a restaurant in Pasadena inspired by her mother’s cooking, but it never quite recovered from the moment when she hired her ex-husband as manager, then fired him after six months, then got sued by him in a case so messy that he later ended up threatening to leak their honeymoon footage. And in 2012 Eva Longoria opened a restaurant called SHe, which was a steakhouse for women complete with smaller portions, a catwalk and dessert menus with mirrors on the back so diners could retouch their makeup. It closed in 2014.

Then there is the daddy of them all, a calamity of such legendary proportions that you have to assume Clooney has paid attention. I am of course referring to Steven Spielberg’s Dive! restaurant that was open for a few years in the 1990s.

It is genuinely hard to know where to start here. Dive! (enough with the overexuberant punctuation already, 90s celebrities) was based on Spielberg’s obsession with submarines, to the extent that it was literally shaped like a submarine – complete with working periscope – and primarily sold submarine sandwiches. Also, at 45-minute intervals, an announcement would interrupt the meal, instructing diners to prepare for submersion. At this point red warning lights would flash and a siren would sound, and it would remain this way until the restaurant had theoretically descended into the ocean. When it opened, the LA Times review stated that: “This restaurant makes me embarrassed to be a human in the 90s.”

Which isn’t to say that Clooney will fall into the same trap as these failed ventures. He is a man of style and good taste, and surely knows that the quickest way to kill a restaurant is to turn it into a museum of his career. A nice, well-run restaurant that can be enjoyed without knowing the work of its primary investor is far more likely to succeed. That said, if there isn’t a Nespresso on every table, someone should kick the windows in.