A Chinese restaurant is being plagued by sick racist phone calls in "cartoon" accents asking if it serves bats.
Steven Mann, owner of Kung Fu Kitchen in Reading, Berkshire, said people regularly call up and make deeply unpleasant comments to him and his wife, Joanne, who is Chinese.
The 32-year-old, originally from Coventry, said the nuisance calls have intensified since the beginning of the pandemic, with people now also asking about the winged rodents, reports BerkshireLive.
After theories began circulating last year that Covid-19 originated in animals, videos started being shared of people in China eating bats.
The couple - whose restaurant serves a mixture of authentic dishes - say they are fed up of the abuse and will now start reporting the callers to the police.
They hope it will deter the harassment suffered by them, as well as others who run similar restaurants.
"I'm English and come from Coventry so I find it more annoying," Steven said. "We're trying to run a business here and these people phone up a lot.
"It's a massive waste of time.
"You get a lot of people thinking it's funny to talk in these cartoon-style Chinese accents to me and to my wife, which is pretty offensive to my wife and my children.
"You also get people phoning up and asking if we serve bat, or dog meat, or cats. It happens all the time and has been happening for years."
His wife, who is 38, added: "I'm very feisty with them, I don't take any nonsense.
"I take their numbers down and block them. But they just keep coming back, I'm sick of it now so will go to the police with this latest one.
"What worries me is that there are people in other restaurants in Reading who don't speak English as well as we do and might be getting the same sort of abuse, so we're going to the police to try to stop it happening to all the Chinese people in Reading."
Mr Mann added one person had even gone to the lengths to use a voice distorter to make a call to the restaurant.
He added: "It was like you hear in films where the voice is very deep and very slow. We're getting pretty sick of all this now, it's very unpleasant and a big waste of our time.
"It's been very difficult for everyone in Covid and this is something that just adds to that stress."
