Applebee's serves baby booze in sippy cup. Big mistake

You've heard of underage drinking, but never this underage. A major restaurant chain is under fire for serving alcohol to a 15-month-old boy. At a Michigan Applebee's, Dominic Dill-Reese, 1, sucked on a sippy cup supposedly filled with apple juice when in fact he was drinking the restaurant's margarita mix.

Only after he "laid his head on the table and dozed off a little bit and woke up and got real happy," according to his mom, was it clear there weren't any apples in that juice. At the hospital, Dominic was found to have a blood alcohol level of .014%.

How the $$#@ did this happen? According to police investigators, the container holding margarita mix was simply mislabeled apple juice, likely because of their similar color. It's a simple mistake that could have turned deadly.

Today, Applebee's is scrambling to institute a new restaurant policy nationwide, ensuring
non-alcoholic drinks are stored in separate areas from alcoholic beverages. They're also making servers pour juice table-side from single serving containers so parents know what's going into their child's sippy cup.

"We want to express how thankful we are that the child involved in the incident at our restaurant in Madison Heights ... was not seriously injured as a result of accidentally receiving the wrong beverage," Nancy Mays, Applebee's spokeswoman, said in a statement Monday. "We also want to apologize to his parents, for the stress and worry this caused them."

Dominic is expected to be okay but his parents probably aren't feeling so great. It's the kind of horror story that could send a cautious mom into a over protective tail spin. Applebee's new policy is a step in the right direction and should be mandatory in every restaurant, but there's always room for human error. After this mishap, will you taste-test everything your child orders in a restaurant just to be safe?

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