Shall it be the Congolese goat stew or the Scottish red-legged partridge? The yam leaves in peanut paste with salted fish, or the wild rabbit terrine? We decide to go for a bit of everything. I'm having dinner with the artist Carsten Höller in his latest project, the Double Club. This is a bar, restaurant and dance club where the Democratic Republic of Congo meets the west, and the west meets Congo. At least, that's the idea.
The club is up an alley beside Angel tube station in Islington, London, and we seem to be neither here nor there. I am confused. We drift between continents, choosing from two simultaneous menus. The most expensive dish on tonight's western menu is cote de boeuf, at £42 for two, while the liboke na mbisi (conger eel in marantaceae leaves) is only £11. The conger is very good, but my favourite is the goat.
This is not, Höller says, some misplaced collision of world cuisines. "There's no fusion here!" he insists, and wants everything to be as authentic as possible. Nor has he suddenly decided to become a chef.
The restaurant - overseen by Mourad Mazouz, founder of London restaurants Momo and Sketch - is learning to cope; in another part of the club, a man in a boiler suit is still tinkering with the as-yet-unfinished dancefloor. Tomorrow, when the club opens, this will rotate, at one revolution per hour, turning between the Congolese and western sides of the club. The DJs will sit on the revolving platform, playing Congolese music or western dance, depending on which side of an invisible international divide they find themselves. So far, the only concession to Africa in the dance hall is a gaudy, kitsch plastic palm tree. The ceiling bristles with disco lighting equipment, which also rotates. But tonight it all feels far away.
Höller is best known in the UK for the slides he installed in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2006. They were enormously popular with the public, which deflected any doubts about their status as art - which, in any case, is an ever more complicated question. Höller currently has a revolving hotel bedroom, where visitors can book a night between satin sheets, in the group show theanyspacewhatever, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. It's booked out for the entire duration of the exhibition, even though you must spend the night watched over by a museum guard.
Sponsored by the Fondazione Prada in Italy, the Double Club will stay open for the next six months. When Höller suggested the idea, he was convinced Prada would turn it down. Not only did they say yes, they insisted on London as a venue. Now he's trying to encourage the Congolese community to come, as well as the regular club scene, plus the foodies, the art crowd, and an inquisitive public.
Week one, and the atmosphere hasn't quite kicked in yet. The cooking has yet to hit its stride, though the barbecue was firing up nicely out in the big open space where the western and Congolese bars collide: swanky lights, serious cocktails and high bar-stools on one side; a knocked-together wooden bar, a big Primus Bière sign on the wall and plastic garden furniture on the other. On good-weather nights, the roof opens up. The whole place is a cultural mash-up, in what feels like a good way. In the restaurant, there are paintings by Andy Warhol and Italian artists Alighiero e Boetti and Carla Accardi. A big wall-relief by Louise Nevelson is due to arrive. The decor is still being tinkered with. Out in the bar there's a huge portrait by Kinshasa-based painter Chéri Samba, and in a corner a seating area of Portuguese tiles, which continue up the wall, their glazed surfaces depicting the utopian, sci-fi apartment blocks of 1920s Russian architect Georgi Krutikow. Sometimes, it is hard to penetrate the logic.
As if this weren't confusing enough, there are three Congos, Höller tells me. There's the former Belgian colony of DRC on one side of the river, and the much smaller former French colony of Congo-Brazzaville on the other. A third Congo exists entirely in the European mind, a mentality and a false memory that has at its core Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness. What about today's civil war? It is far from Kinshasa, Höller, a frequent visitor, tells me. He has been visiting the DRC, a place as big as western Europe, since around 2000, having first travelled to Benin in the mid-1990s. He fell in love with the music, the vitality and complexity of Congo's culture.
Höller himself is German, although born and brought up in Belgium. He now lives in Stockholm. Before becoming an artist, he was a biologist. I ask him what led him away from science: was it the nerdiness of science types, all those beards? The beards were definitely a problem, he says; scientists are so nervous of being regarded as charlatans, they don't want people to think they care what they look like.
But aren't people suspicious about art and artists, I ask - and is the Double Club an art work? Half art, half not, he tells me, like the slides. For a lot of people, especially the kids who used them, the slides were just a playground. Niceties about what might be art don't appear to worry Höller. Not so long ago, he installed a carousel with chairs in chains in London's Gagosian gallery. He seems to like things that go round and round. The club, he says, is also here for people who are hungry, and people who want to drink, dance and meet their friends. Höller admits he doesn't party much these days. He likes to spend his evenings at home, beside a lake near Stockholm, where he breeds nightingales for a hobby. I ask him if he's ever eaten one. Only the tongues, he tells me. This could be a wind-up, but there is something entirely genuine about the artist.
Earlier this year, Höller and I took part in a discussion about art and food at Ferran Adrià's world-famous El Bulli restaurant in Catalonia. During the discussion, chef Heston Blumenthal was wary of describing what he did as art, and Höller also expressed doubts about his own status as an artist. "I just want to play out some things in my life," he now says.
Höller is, I think, simply curious about the world. Just as the Double Club is intended to be two places at once, he likes the idea of spending half the year in Sweden, half in Africa. Like the nightingales, he says, on their annual migrations. This sounds magical, but the logistics come down to hard reality. As well as having Mazouz on board, the project has been overseen by Jan Kennedy, who opened the restaurant Quo Vadis with Marco Pierre White back in the 1990s. Design studios and architects have also played their part. Höller is the impresario of all this.
Describing the fear, pleasure and out-of-control screaming abdabs some participants experienced as they sped earthward on his Tate slides, Höller has talked about people as "pleasure bundles", and the effect his art has on us as bodies in space. Space is not just physical. And we are not only bodies in space, but minds, too. Höller, I think, wants to take us out of ourselves and re-find some pleasure in the world. That includes eating, drinking and having fun. Does this make him an artist or just an entertainer?
After a certain point in the evening, the question no longer seems interesting. Instead, we toy with our northern European winter comfort food, and the Congolese stews and barbecues, having our rumbles in the disco jungle, and following the footsteps of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness ("The horror! The horror!") as we spill out into the cold glare of the credit crunch, the 5am Islington morning.
The Double Club, at 7 Torrens Street, London EC1, opens tomorrow. Details: thedoubleclub.co.uk
