This Restaurant Lets You Dine Inside A Cemetery
It seems like only yesterday when images of people dining in the sky surfaced on the internet. A company by the name of Dinner in the Sky hung a huge dining table 100 feet up in the sky with the help of a crane and strapped guests onto chairs and held this pop-up dining experience in multiple cities around the world (via Delish).
This isn't the first and the last of an uncomfortable dining experience you must have heard of. From dining under the sea in the Maldives to eating in a jail with real-life inmates as your waiters in Italy, there are plenty of wacky restaurants in the world for anyone adventurous enough to try them (via Thrillist).
There's one restaurant, however, that seems like it might just top the chart of bizarre. According to Atlas Obscura, the New Lucky Restaurant in Ahmedabad, India, lets its guests drink tea with the dead — quite literally!
The New Lucky Restaurant experience
The New Lucky Restaurant started as a small pushcart 62 years ago (via The Tribune). The owner, K.H. Mohammadbhai, used to park his shop under a tree in the graveyard and sold tea to any patrons walking by. With time, the tea stall turned into a sit-down restaurant built around the same graveyard.
While it looks like any other restaurant from the outside, it has tables that share space with 26 open graves covered in green cloths, which, the waiters speculate, may be 500 years old. When the restaurant owner Krishnan Kutti bought the space, he decided to turn the burial spots into the restaurant's main attraction, choosing to build small protective bars over the graves rather than demolish them (via Atlas Obscura). The graves are cleaned regularly, fresh flowers are placed on them, and incense sticks are lit every day out of respect for the dead. A popular theory amongst customers, staff, and owners is that the graves belong to followers of a 16th-century Sufi saint.
Rather than being spooked by the fact that you have the dead for company while enjoying an afternoon tea, Kutti thinks that the graves bring good luck instead (hence the restaurant name "Lucky"), and it seems that locals agree with him. The Tribune reports that the restaurant is a hit amongst locals who stop by to enjoy hot tea with buttered buns slathered in jam, totally unfazed by the fact that they're dining in a graveyard.
In fact, the restaurant hangs a rare original M.F. Hussain painting, which was gifted to the first owner K.H. Mohammadbhai by the iconic painter, who happened to be a great fan of New Lucky Restaurant's tea.