Heather Mills is converting a fish restaurant near her home into a vegan eatery, and rumor has it that she intends to start a global chain of vegan restaurants:

She has never been one to shy away from controversy.

So when Heather Mills decided to buy a popular fish restaurant near her home, her first move was obvious: take fish off the menu.

Miss Mills plans to turn the seaside eaterie into a vegan restaurant, believed to be the first in a planned worldwide chain.

And there was bad news for staff as well as seafood-loving clientele: the current owner has laid them off and told them they will not be re-employed when the renovated cafe re-opens.

Miss Mills, 41, signed the deal to take over the Big Fish Cafe near her home in Hove, East Sussex, on Friday.

Daily Mail

As far as Heather Mills ‘great’ ideas go, this might be one of the better ones. Certainly it ranks higher than her plan to represent herself in divorce court. There are a lot of vegans who would love to be able to go to a restaurant and have a large choice of food instead of just one or two dishes that a non-vegan restaurant might offer, and many people would love to try quality vegan food.

If Heather chooses to go fast food style with this, are we going to see her face in cartoon form, promoting kiddie tofu on television? Because as much as I think this is a good idea, and I’d love to have good choice of healthy food via a drive-thru, Heather Mills is hardly the lovable character that Colonel Sanders is. Besides, Heather has a hard time keeping publicists, mostly because she doesn’t like to pay them and has an inability to self censor or take advice.

Heather is attracting some negative publicity for the planned venture. While it’s unfortunate she sacked staff, she wasn’t obliged to keep them on. But the previous owner says she stiffed him out of money and paid him £115,000 ($160,000 USD) less than she originally agreed on.

‘Last July I decided to sell so I got in touch. I went to see her at her home and we made a verbal agreement for £255,000. That was later agreed in writing.

‘The arrangement changed in November,’ Mr Short told the Sunday Mirror. ‘I got a letter from her lawyer saying the price had dropped to £140,000. It blamed the credit crunch and the “current economic climate”.

‘Her lawyer said there were other issues such as the cost of the ground rent going up and the need to renovate the windows. I was shocked, absolutely gutted.’

And he claimed: ‘I’d put off other buyers who were offering the full price thinking I had a deal with Heather. There was nowhere else I could go.’

Daily Mail

If you have an agreement in writing, can you just decide to knock £115,000 off the price and the seller has to accept it? If there was some urgency to sell perhaps he had to accept Heather’s offer, but if he had other interested offers why didn’t he tell Heather to forget it and re-list the property? Something in Mr Short’s story smells fishy, pun intended.

Heather Mills is shown hosting a healthy cooking day for families in the Bronx on 1/10/09. Credit: WENN.com