Waiter, I want you to get me a better table

B laze Starr, your table is ready.

Indeed, the iconic Baltimore stripper could BE the table at the "naked sushi" restaurant proposed for downtown.

Diners would eat their sashimi off reclining women, and the women, like the fish, would be in the raw.

Key body parts would be covered by the likes of lettuce and flowers. (Wasabi's out for obvious reasons, but why not pickled ginger pasties?) Other than that, it's Yellowtail Belly to human belly, Fatty Hamachi to flat abs.

"We're trying to do something very nice, very classy," said Alicia Hines, who pitched the plan to the city's liquor board with partner JaMea Elliott last week.

The restaurant is proposed for 40 South St., in a former coffee shop. That's not far from The Block. But Hines described the concept of nyataimori sushi - a 400-year-old practice in Japan, she said, that's become popular in L.A., New York and Florida - as art. An art form heretofore unknown in the Land of Pleasant Living and Inanimate Dinner Tables.

"We refer to it as art theater," she said. "It's more like you're going for dinner and instead of seeing a play or a movie, you're seeing live dinner theater, which happens to be also where you eat your meal."

Hines and Elliott presented the idea a few months ago to a confused William Cole, the city councilman whose district includes downtown. Naked sushi?

"I thought sushi was already uncooked," he said.

The women explained.

"I don't eat sushi, so it's not going to interest me," Cole told them, but he said he'd get behind the project if they could get the liquor board, Downtown Partnership and Baltimore Development Corp. on board.

The women made the rounds but neglected to mention the Nude! Nude! Nude! gimmick to anyone but Cole.

(Hines said they weren't trying to hide anything. They just didn't want other restaurateurs stealing the idea. "This Downtown Partnership, they know all the restaurants," Hines said.)

Cole had alerted someone at the Downtown Partnership, and that guy raised the minor matter of nakedness at the liquor board hearing. The women who'd been pitching the innocent-sounding Water Front Restaurant were forced to lay it all out there, pulling out a package of photos.

"They showed a model lying out with food all over her and a little wax paper on her private areas," said board Chairman Steve Fogleman.

Unsure if naked sushi requires an adult entertainment license, the board delayed action for 30 days.