By Adetokunbo FAKEYE
A Nigerian restaurant in Kettering has changed its name from Aso Rock to Zuma Rock months after opening following a legal threat from another Nigerian restaurant with same name.
A taste of Africa came to town when Katherine and Daniel Ememere welcomed their first customers to Aso Rock in February.
But the name of the Rockingham Road venue angered a London family-run restaurant which has been called Aso Rock since 1999, although it wasn’t trademarked.
They started legal action – saying diners were mistaking it as being affiliated with them – and after a row which even saw the police called the Kettering venue has now changed its name to Zuma Rock.
Ayo Adesina, whose father Sunday opened Aso Rock in London, said: “I’m not having it. They have picked on the wrong person, the wrong company and the wrong family. We are trying to go national and we cannot have some random shop somewhere that people think is associated with us”.
Katherine said they did not see anything with the same name when they registered it on Companies House last year and that there was ‘no way’ they would have known – but that the name wasn’t worth fighting over.
The row began in January this year when Ayo, who runs his Nigerian restaurant in Dalston with relatives, started getting calls about him opening a store in Kettering.
But it was news to him – and he still didn’t believe it was real when he saw the sign for the Kettering venue.
He said: “When I saw a picture of the sign I thought it was done by AI – I thought my friend was just winding me up”.
When Ayo realised it was real he wrote a cease and desist letter, explaining that his restaurant which delivers across the capital had been using the name for 25 years, and delivered it by hand to the Ememeres’ home in Corby. He also filed a trademark application for the restaurant name Aso Rock, which is named after a monolith outside the Nigerian capital Abuja and the presidential villa.
What followed was an angry row between both sides, which each accused each other of being abusive, and police even called to a confrontation between them in Kettering.
Credit: Northants Telegraph
