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Wait, Limoncello Is Alcoholic? Father Of Two Young Boys Finds Out The Hard Way

By Stacey Cole
Published on: 03:06 PST, Jun 6, 2017

A father of 7-year-old and 10-year-old boys made a terrible mistake when he allowed them to order Limoncello at a restaurant.

The father, named Matt Heath, didn’t realize his young sons were being served alcohol at the restaurant, as neither he nor the waiter knew Limoncello contained alcohol.

Heath, a popular radio D.J., found out that Limoncello was alcoholic when it was too late: two of his sons had already sipped on the lemon liqueur.

Heath penned an article for the New Zealand Herald, revealing details of the incident. The author argues that no harm was done to his kids from a few small sips of the 30 percent alcohol Limoncello.

Heath, who joked that he won’t tolerate his 7-year-old and 10-year-old sons “getting on the turps,” watched his two kids drink the alcoholic beverage in front of him. Although the radio D.J. says he’d like his kids to “stay off the beers as long as possible,” he quickly adds that “sometimes you can’t stop it.”

It’s unclear who actually ordered Limoncello off the restaurant menu: the father or the boys, but it could have been Heath, as he claims neither of his sons liked the taste of the alcoholic beverage, suggesting that they had never tried it before.

What was particularly alarming for Heath, however, is that while his youngest son said Limoncello tasted like “medicine,” the 10-year-old recognized it was alcohol.

“Which raised some alarm bells. How does my 10-year-old know what alcohol tastes like?”

While this suggests that Heath’s plans to keep his sons off beers “as long as possible” may have already failed in his sons’ pre-teens, one can argue that it was the waiter’s responsibility to know what he’s serving to restaurant guests, especially children.

While saying that most parents would “murder a restaurateur for serving booze to their super precious little ones,” Heath says he acted “cool” and “very understanding.”

However, Heath was dealing with another problem: wrestling the cup of alcoholic Limoncello off his youngest son, who – after hearing the beverage contained alcohol – “cracked up laughing and shoved the whole cup in his face,” the father writes.

While Heath argues his youngest son’s motivation to drink as much Limoncello as possible before it was taken away was that it was “his last chance to taste booze for a decade or so,” the father joked he had to do something his own friends “have kindly done to me many times over the years” – wrestle the alcoholic beverage off him.

The next day, Heath writes, one of his sons approached him – the father does not specify whether or not his kid had a hangover or not – and asked why children weren’t allowed to drink alcohol and beverages such as Limoncello while adults could.

This got Heath puzzled for a second, and he came up with a pretty illogical response, saying that “maybe it’s because children act drunk all the time.”

“‘Running around doing stupid things with no thought of the consequences,’ I tried. But that wasn’t logical and he knew it.'”

The father then offered another explanation, telling his son that children weren’t allowed to drink alcohol because young brains are still growing and drinking might damage them.

This isn’t the first time a pre-teen has been exposed to alcohol. This past March, a 5-year-old accidentally packed her school lunchbox with vodka, according to the Daily Mail.

The five-year-old’s mom got a call from her daughter’s school and was told that her child brought vodka to the school. The Queensland mom explained that she had instructed her daughter to grab a juice pouch from the refrigerator, and the five-year-old thought a colorful pouch of Raspberry-flavored vodka was the juice.

[Featured Image by Voyagerix/Shutterstock]

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