A New Jersey singer-songwriter says she was stunned and deeply upset after an upscale restaurant marked her birthday dessert with a message that singled out her wheelchair.
Antonia Sinbaldi was celebrating her 29th birthday in June with friends and family at Blu on the Hudson, a waterfront restaurant in Weehawken, N.J., when she ordered an Apple Tart Tatin to end the meal.
Instead of a simple birthday greeting, the plate arrived with the words “Happy Wheel Chair Birthday” written in sauce.
Sinbaldi later shared video from the celebration on Instagram, showing the dessert — described as puff pastry served with vanilla ice cream and salted caramel — along with the message that left her and those at the table shaken.
“Not to complain about a fairly new restaurant in my town, but why would you make my dessert say this?” she wrote on Instagram. “What was written on my plate probably set my employee off more than me. I would never expect that in my town.”
Sinbaldi uses a motorized wheelchair and requires a ventilator after sustaining a cervical spinal injury at age 2, when a drunk driver crashed into the car she was riding in.
The message, she said, left her confused and overwhelmed, with her body responding before she could fully process what had happened.
“Body started shaking, body started spasming. My body reacted faster than my mouth or my mind,” Sinbaldi told WNBC on Tuesday.
After the initial shock, Sinbaldi’s party confronted the management of the Weehawken establishment — which opened in 2023 — and questioned the message.
The party was offered complimentary drinks, she claimed.
“It offended me. This whole thing doesn’t sound real,” Sinbaldi told the outlet.
The restaurant said the message was a misunderstanding between staffers after the order was placed, indicating the birthday dessert was for Sinbaldi, the diner with the wheelchair.
“We sincerely apologize to the guest and to everyone who was hurt or offended by this incident which took place on June 20, 2026. Treating every guest with dignity, respect, and care is fundamental to who we are as a company,” the restaurant said in a statement to WCBS.
“Our standard operating procedure is to use table and seat numbers on tickets to identify where each dish should be delivered. In this instance, the word ‘wheelchair’ was used as a reference to identify where a birthday dessert with a candle should be delivered,” the management said. “Unfortunately, that notation was misunderstood and was written on the plate itself. There was absolutely no malicious or disrespectful intent behind the notation. However, we fully understand how seeing that word written on a plate could be deeply hurtful and upsetting.”
Sinbaldi didn’t fully agree with the restaurant’s sentiment, calling it a “bs response.”
“My chair is not my identity, Sinbaldi wrote on Instagram. “Like I said, my body was reacting faster than my mind so I couldn’t leave that fast.”
Sinbaldi, an advocate for disability rights, asked for people to learn from the birthday mishap.
“Don’t bring my disability [up] in every sentence, is what people, they should know,” she told the outlet.
