Vancouver: Keatley Films is cooking up a little promotional innovation as a side dish to its new six-episode CHUM restaurant drama Godiva’s, set in Vancouver.

Depending on what’s on the menu for Canadian drama in 2005, Check, Please is planned as a six-episode talent search that will run concurrently with Godiva’s in January across the CHUM group of stations.

Check, Please – which according to show publicist Bill Vigars already has funding from the CTF’s Promotion of Programming Fund to pump up Canadian series – is a cross-Canada open-audition contest to find a full, regular cast member for season two of Godiva’s, assuming that season two is a go.

The twist in this ‘Canadian Idol-like’ competition is that only fulltime restaurant employees can audition – which shouldn’t be a stretch since, as the stereotype goes, most restaurant workers are unemployed actors, anyway.

Check, Please details were still being worked out at press time, but the schedule calls for audition stops in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver.

The drama, meanwhile, turns up the heat when production gets rolling in Vancouver Sept. 30 to Nov. 22.

Gary Harvey (a Cold Squad alum with Julia Keatley) will direct the series, written by Michael MacLennon (Queer as Folk). Godiva’s started life as a 13-epsisode pitch, shrunk to an MOW in last year’s funding crunch at the Canadian Television Fund, and grew again to be six episodes when new money was found. Gigi Boyd, also from Cold Squad, produces.

In the series, Godiva’s is an upscale fine-dining restaurant that is trying to find its way through its eclectic buffet of multi-ethnic characters.

The production, which is housed in the same Burnaby studio that hosted Cold Squad’s interiors, is hiring a chef consultant and has built a full kitchen to prepare meals used in the scenes.