A SWINDON restaurant mistakenly given a zero hygiene rating on the Food Standards Agency website is fighting to recover after seeing bookings plummet.

The Burj at Wanborough was inspected in April but it was taken over in June and given a revamp by new proprietor Swapan Roy.

More than £18,000 was spent on kitchen improvements, including a new floor, fridge and stainless steel units. A new team was also brought in to run the restaurant.

However the listing on the agency’s public website was not updated to show it was a new business and awaiting another inspection. When the ratings were announced it appeared in the Advertiser along with nine other zero-rated eateries.

Almost immediately bookings began to drop off. In the week following the rating the restaurant suffered hundreds of pounds-worth of cancellations – sometimes several in one day.

Within days a booking for 50 people was cancelled, along with a Christmas party.

“This is not the only thing we are suffering,” said Mr Roy. “Since that day we have not received any corporate customer bookings and that was our main bread and butter. Our book is literally empty.”

And instead of receiving notifications of online bookings they were being notified of cancellations.

He and head chef Parimal Sarkar, formerly of the Palm at Marlborough, had invested a decade’s-worth of savings into the new business. “We had been hoping that all our investment was going to pay off.

“Now we don’t know whether this business is a good thing or not,” he said. “Ten people work for us and since that day we are struggling to pay their wages.”

Swindon Borough Council officers returned to inspect the kitchens last week and Mr Roy is awaiting notification of the Burj’s new rating.

“I’m hopeful we will get at least four stars if not five,” he said. “We have done a lot of work.”

As well as major improvements in the kitchen, other parts of the building had been given a facelift and an abandoned beer garden that was full of rubbish was in the process of being brought back to life.

After they took over bookings had doubled and they had set their sights on gaining a reputation as a fine dining establishment.

“The chef is one of the best chefs in the whole of the West of England,” said Mr Roy. “We have a vision. We want to be equal to the Palm.”

He explained that unlike many of the restaurants and takeaways listed in Swindon the Burj was a long way out of town.

That was one of the reasons the rating had been so catastrophic. People did not walk past and decide to drop in for a curry after a night out.

“We are a destination business,” he said. Customers would drive some distance and spend the whole evening at the restaurant and most booked several weeks ahead.

A borough council spokesman said it was not clear why the agency’s website had not been updated with the new information, but it was likely the delay was a result of ratings being submitted from all over the country which might caused the delay.

He confirmed the Burj had now been re-inspected.