A restaurant owner has said he will have to start turning off the lights and charging £25 for a curry after his latest energy bill rocketed 500% to £2,250 a month. Boshiur Rahman of the Monsoon Indian Cuisine posted a tongue-in-cheek post on Facebook joking that it would have to start charging "£25 for a chicken tikka masala" after getting his energy bill for August.
Boshiur says his his energy bills were only £400 a month last year and added: "If you see the lights off at Monsoon, please do still come in." Boshiur told DorsetLive: "We've got to somehow dig into reserves and pay the bills. We've got suppliers all throughout the chain, increasing their fees and it's just a snowball effect.
"The end result is bad for the customer because we're having to increase our prices, but at what point do we increase our prices? Is it ridiculous to charge more than £15 for a curry?"
"Because of cost of living, people just don't have money," said Boshiur. "If I start charging £12 to £15 for a standard curry, they're not going to pay it. You might get the odd person, but it's not sustainable."
"In terms of actions, we can't really do much in terms of saving energy," explained Boshiur. "In August, we didn't have heating on, we wouldn't have had the lights on during the day. All of our lighting is LED anyway, and the things that we have on have to be on otherwise we can't operate without them.
This is the bill that Boshiur Rahman, owner of Monsoon Indian Cuisine, received amid soaring energy prices (Image: Monsoon Indian Cuisine)
"We've got fridges that need to be and while I could probably invest in more efficient fridges, but that's another setback. It's about £5,000 to replace all of those fridges, if not more.
"There's nothing that I can think of immediately that will make a big dent in that £2.2K bill - I highly doubt it. There's nothing that we can really do, and that's what's concerning."
Boshiur said: "There is no price cap for energy, it's unlimited. They can charge whatever they want, basically. And there's no support there's nothing, that I'm aware of, that has been announced."
He added: "I think somebody needs to step in at some point. Whether it is a reduction in VAT, or a price cap on energy for the commercial sector, there needs to be something because there's nothing there. There's absolutely nothing. We're just expected to pay it or fail.
"Off the back of Covid, we're already quite a stricken sector," said Boshiur. "The last three years haven't been great for hospitality, and it seems to just be getting worse."
