A man with a facial disfigurement says he was asked to leave a restaurant in south London because staff said he was “scaring the customers”.
Oliver Bromley has Neurofibromatosis Type 1, a genetic condition that causes non-cancerous tumours to grow on his nerves.
Speaking to the BBC, he said when he had gone to place an order at a restaurant in Camberwell, staff told him there had been complaints about him.
“It’s a horrible thing to happen. I took it very personally on the day,” he said.
I’ll take a restaurant full of disfigured people over 1 misbehaving toddler.
As a parent of younger kids, we’re sorry. We come armed with as many activities as possible and will take our kids outside if they’re too excited until food gets to the table. That will help them focus on eating.
We very rarely went out to eat when they were toddlers due to fear of our kids bothering others and understand that our desire to experience some level of normalcy shouldn’t come at the expense of others.
All that said, if the parents are trying to keep their kids occupied, please extend some grace. Being a parent can be extremely isolating and we’re simply trying to pretend like we still get to do normal things once in a while.
If you’re trying, the ire isn’t for you. It’s for the shitty parents that feel entitled to not teach their children to behave, don’t feel it’s their job to or act like they are a victim of a life choice and take it out on the child or others. There are plenty of those type out there and I’m sure you don’t want to be lumped in with those ones, you also don’t have to defend them.
As someone who formerly worked at a restaurant, I agree.
We were located in a fenced off area owned by the same company that had a string of bars/clubs, so after 8pm only 21+ were allowed in, but on Saturday afternoons the stroller crowd would roll through and let their kids run around making a mess of all the tables.
I’m not against parents bringing their kids out for a meal, but if they’re just sitting there pounding beer after beer and ignoring their chaotic unleashed children then it gets really old really fast.
I know judging people on their appearances isn’t right, and he shouldn’t have been kicked out regardless of what he looked like.
… but it doesn’t even look that bad? Like, “I’ve got one eye and a skin condition”, is that really what the restaurant is willing to kick people out for?
Hope he gets some sort of justice out of this.
Some people are just determined to make it difficult to believe humanity is worth saving.
Don’t worry…
See, Britain just needs Ugly Laws, like what America had up until 1974! Then they could just have the guy arrested!
In all seriousness what the fuck. What goes through a person’s head that they think treating someone that way is even remotely okay?
They don’t want to look at that guy’s ugly face? I bet it looks nicer than their ugly minds.
Probably looks better than their ugly faces too.
It seems that some British hate handicapped/disfigured people. Just read this article about a kid in a wheelchair being excluded from the school photo. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/mar/29/aberdeenshire-pupils-with-complex-needs-erased-from-school-photo
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/04/school-photos-disabled-children
or people complaining about seeing a tv host with a missing arm. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/feb/21/tv-presenter-cerrie-burnell
It’s just good old British Classism that never went away.
Wonder if it’s got anything to do with thalidomide disfiguration.
No, fuck off, that’s got nothing to do with nationality.
This is just a case of some people being cunts.
For a community that prides itself on not being reddit, an unfortunate amount of reddits opinions and (lack of) values made it here alright.
Or maybe that has nothing to do with the community as a whole and is just a case of some people being cunts?
Nah… the british have a propensity for treating different people badly.
Yes, the species is prone to it, it’s a damn shame.
That’s just horrible. And wtf is this “Yes it’s a crime but what can we do?” bullshit. Man I feel sorry for that guy. No body deserves to be treated that way. He just wanted to have a nice night out. Fuck that restaurant.
That’s fucked.
He said they had told him that although it was a hate crime, it was “unlikely” officers could pursue it further.
But when someone shop lifts from a corporation, here come the cops running
Time to lawyer up. Though I don’t know how the law works there in Britland.
Fuck that restaurant, everyone is too “ugly” to eat there. I can think of many DC restaurants that would love to serve them.
wait, in the article, why is his left eye removed in the first photo and his right eye in the next?
One of them is probably flipped.
Nah, I bet he’s faking it. Continuity error
Crisis actor!
Obviously he’s faking his condition for attention…
🤦Lmao most downvoted comment for asking a reasonable question (albeit with a pretty well understood answer). Lemmy truly is reddit 2.0
Were you expecting philosopher kings with a more advanced heuristic than “I don’t like this post”? The improvement is decentralization - that doesn’t make the users nice or smart.
Well, I agree that the users here aren’t nice or smart. So here we are.
Then why do you use Lemmy/Reddit at all?
Good question. I got off Reddit after they banned third party apps, but I should probably get off Lemmy as well.
There were a lot of great things about Reddit that originally led me there, but everything I loved about it was gone by the time I left. I was hoping Lemmy would fill that hole; I was looking for a place for great insights and opinions around niche topics. But Lemmy feels more like a political echo chamber, which is a shame.
The original comment we’re responding to is a great example of that. There’s no reason for ignorance to be hated like it is here, but dislike and getting on the negative bandwagon is what Lemmy thrives on.
I’ll probably be gone soon, and your comments are a big part of that. I genuinely don’t mean that as an insult, it’s just that you inspired some
retrospectionintrospection. I guess this comment is basically just for myself in the end, but thank you.
