Pappu Sweet Centre

It’s not often that an inner-city restaurant in the West Midlands makes international headlines, but that’s what happened with the Pappu Sweet Centre last week, after a court in Wolverhampton heard that its owner, 45-year-old Jaswinder Singh, had been found preparing kebabs just feet away from a dead man lying on a sofa.

According to one account, from the Press Association, Singh was discovered cooking opposite the corpse after police were called to the food outlet on August 27 to investigate the sudden death of a worker. Apparently, during a health inspection, a dead rat had been spotted under a cooking pot, as well as mouldy food, flies, rat droppings and “employees smoking and spitting on the floor within food areas”.

I was e-mailed no fewer than four versions of the story, which isn’t a surprise, I suppose, given that (1) the restaurant made the eateries in Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares show look like Claridge’s; (2) the story tapped into the morbid fear we all entertain, that the indeterminate meat in doner kebabs is actually composed of rat meat or human flesh; and (3) Singh resides in the street where I grew up.

However, the more I read about the restaurant, the less I felt I knew about what actually happened…

Read atTimes Online