The owner of the Matlock Gurkha Inn in Derbyshire has blamed bad reviews and a temporary loss of business on the discovery of a bejeweled chicken foot and a three-headed snake statue outside his restaurant.
As reported by the Daily Star, Manohar Kunwar, 45, the owner of Nepalese restaurant Matlock Gurkha Inn, believes the business was cursed after two strange objects were found in the premises’ garden.
Kunwar said his business partner found a chicken foot and a statue of a three-headed snake in some bushes and decided to display the ornaments inside the restaurant.
He claims, however, that since that decision was made, the restaurant experienced a number of problems including power cuts, gas issues, flickering lights, loss of business and bad reviews. Once he removed the both of the objects, business returned to normal.
Manohar said: “When we started it was going very well. We were making £1,000 a day. At the weekends it was very busy and we couldn’t cope with all the customers. My business partner went to clean the restaurant on the outside and he found a large three-headed snake statue hidden in the bushes.
“They are things I have never seen and with the foot decorated like that it seems suspicious.
“Things changed when we found the chicken foot and the snake. We had a problem with the gas, a problem with the hot water.
“Because of the water we had to close for nine days to fix it and that badly affected business. We started losing customers because we had so many problems.
“That was about the time when things started to go wrong and from the next week it was dead, even on Friday and Saturday.
“It wasn’t normal. We started to think maybe there was some witchcraft”.
Kunwar, who opened the restaurant in a former pub in 2016, said that after putting the objects outside “business started to improve almost immediately. It’s very suspicious”.
He said that he didn’t know how the objects came to be outside the restaurant but that “we suspect it could have been a rival to our business, but we can’t say. We can’t blame anyone”.
He added that his business partner is speaking to a priest in order to “deactivate” the sculptures.
The restaurant has a 4.5 ‘excellent’ rating on Tripadvisor but has received a number of ‘terrible’ and ‘poor’ reviews in recent months.