Woman 'Baffled' By Restaurant's Insensitive Birthday Dessert Message
A New Jersey singer-songwriter says a birthday celebration turned distressing after a restaurant served her a dessert with the words "Happy Birthday Wheelchair" written on the plate.
Antonia Sinibaldi was celebrating her 29th birthday with friends and family at Blu on the Hudson in Weehawken on June 20 when she and her cousin ordered the same apple cinnamon dessert. When the plates arrived, Sinibaldi found the message written on hers. "The body started shaking, the body started spasming," she told NBC New York. "My body reacted faster than my mouth or my mind."
A Painful Reminder During a Celebration
Sinibaldi, who has used a wheelchair and ventilator since sustaining a cervical spinal cord injury in a car crash involving a drunk driver at age 2, said the message caught her completely off guard. "It took me by surprise," she told CBS News. "I shouldn't be reminded of something that I already know."
According to Sinibaldi, when her group flagged the issue with a manager, the restaurant offered complimentary drinks but did not explain at the time why the word had appeared on her plate. "My family's angry, my friends are angrier, but me, I'm just baffled by it," she told WCBS.
How the Restaurant Says It Happened
In a statement to PEOPLE, Blu on the Hudson said its standard procedure is to use table and seat numbers on kitchen tickets to identify where each dish should go, and that in this case, the word "wheelchair" had been used internally as a reference for where to deliver Sinibaldi's dessert. The restaurant said that reference was then mistakenly written directly onto the plate along with the birthday message.
"There was absolutely no malicious or disrespectful intent behind the notation," the statement read. "However, we fully understand how seeing that word written on a plate could be deeply hurtful and upsetting." The restaurant said it has since reinforced proper ticketing and communication procedures with its staff and issued a broader apology to "everyone who was hurt or offended by the incident."
Sinibaldi's Response to the Apology
Sinibaldi addressed the restaurant's explanation in an Instagram post, calling it a "BS response" as her story gained wider attention online. She said she does not plan to return to the restaurant.
Sinibaldi has spoken and written publicly in the past about life with a spinal cord injury, including a 2022 guest post for SPINALpedia in which she described herself as a vent-dependent quadriplegic and discussed the day-to-day realities of living with a severe spinal cord injury.
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