Aadil Mamujee

Every weekend I ask my boys what they want for dinner. They shout the same answer: “Sir Restaurant!”

Sir Restaurant is a character we created a year ago. He is a posh, proper English chef who arrives to cook dinner for my five-year-old and three-year-old. He transforms from me in the bathroom, bows as he enters the kitchen, and speaks in a theatrical accent. “Good evening, sirs!” and then serves dinner omakase style and introduces every course, formally. He also happens to look just like me, except for the accent and theatrics.

The meal is planned around the fish. We go to Fish Tales, the neighborhood market in Brooklyn. Kal (5) wants to know about all the options – salmon, tuna, snapper, sole. Remy (3) points at the lobsters and laughs. On the way out, they each get a Swedish fish.

Back home, we marinate it together. They insist that Papa marinates it, NOT Sir Restaurant. He’s much too important for that, and after all he’s on a plane from London to arrive for dinner service. We season it with salt, paprika, and garlic, though Remy always tries to add extra of everything, and by the end flour is everywhere. Sir Restaurant prefers mise en place, so we clean up for his arrival.

At dinner time, the boys call for Sir Restaurant. I disappear into the bathroom and reemerge a moment later, bow, and announce the first course. It’s a full tasting menu – sometimes eight courses. Cherry tomatoes, smoked salmon with chips, crudités, bread, then pan-fried fish with a butter/garlic/parsley sauce. Always ice cream to end the meal. Sir Restaurant bows, tips his hat, and disappears to catch a flight back to London “Till next time Sir Kal and Sir Remy”. Papa comes back and clears the plates. The whole thing makes eating fun: the boys sit longer, eat more, and eat real food without negotiation. It’s also a good way for the three of us to spend a few hours together.

I’m on parental leave and wanted to build small personal projects with AI. Sir Restaurant was an obvious first candidate for a creative project. I wanted to turn him into a children’s book.

The process was fast. Walking home from school drop-off one morning, I dictated the whole world of Sir Restaurant into Superwhisper—characters, ritual, fish market, tone—in about ten minutes. I fed the transcript to Claude and had it structure the story into a clean outline. I passed this into Gemini’s Storybook feature and added a few reference images to help craft the specific art style. Two or three iterations, almost entirely on the illustrations, and the book was done. The writing was solid on the first pass. Most of my tweaks were to the look of the characters: the goatee a little smaller, the hat a little bigger, the kitchen warmer and familiar.

The finished book is here. I have read the book to the boys three or four times now. They love it, with one exception. Kal studied the cover for a long time, then looked up at me and said, “Papa. Why does Sir Restaurant have a goatee and you don’t have a goatee?”

I also tried to turn the book into a short film using Veo, Gemini’s video generator. The generations themselves are fun but the current cap on any single clip is 15–20 seconds, which isn’t enough to string together a proper story (and no continuity between clips). I tabled the animated idea for now, but I have no doubt in a year or two this will be trivial.

One half of this project was creative – voice, menu, the details that make the ritual ours. The other half was execution: a tight outline and quick iterations. A few years ago, this would have required an illustrator, weeks of back-and-forth, and a budget while this version got made between school drop-off and lunch.

Most of these fleeting family rituals eventually go away, and this one gets to live on as a permanent artifact.