A café owner who was slammed online has defended his decision to force a family to leave.
Adrian Dall'oste asked the customers to leave after one of their kids began throwing a tantrum in his café in Australia.
The bloke is the co-owner of Adele’s Cafe in Horseshoe Bay on Magnetic Island and says it’s the first time in eight-and-a-half years of running the spot that he’s been forced to do this.
Dall'oste told the Townsville Bulletin that two kids aged around two and three got upset after their parents said they’d be sharing one gelato between them.
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He claims that the older one then got so worked up they took it out on his café – swiping at decorations and throwing a steel flask onto the tiled floor – which he was surprised didn’t smash.
The Aussie reckons the tantrum lasted about a good 15 minutes before he decided to take a stand while the kid was ‘absolutely screeching’.
But Dall'oste found himself victim to a whole load of online backlash after an onlooker posted footage of the ‘absolutely disgusting’ incident online.
Laura Edwards was fuming with the owner’s decision and said: “It wasn’t a meltdown or tantrum; my kids make more noise than these kids do. It was just a grizzly kid needing some help to sort through his emotions at the time.
“The parents were sitting down with them; they weren’t running riot.”
Dall'oste says he was confused by her involvement and added that she’d only arrived after he’d asked them to leave.
But she says that as both a parent and a customer she felt she was well within her rights to speak up for the booted-out family.
After a mixed response on social media, the bloke defended his decision as he said: “I only intervened because the children were vandalising the shop and disrupting other customers.”
He’s claimed that the family initially refused to leave his café and he ended up threatening to call the police in order to have them gone.
Since the story has been shared online Dall'oste has received backing from other members of the public, with one person saying: “Good on the business owner, I would have done the exact same thing. He has a duty to make sure everyone has an enjoyable experience.
"I have kids and when they were little, if they carried on like little brats I would have packed up and left out of the respect for others.”
Jess Battison