Toddler Served Wine Instead of Apple Juice at Salinas Restaurant Hospitalized With 0.12 Blood Alcohol Level
A family dinner turned into a frightening trip to the emergency room when a 2-year-old girl was accidentally served wine instead of apple juice at a California restaurant. The toddler’s parents, Noemi Valencia and her partner, were among a large group dining at Fujiyama Sushi & Hibachi Restaurant in Salinas when they noticed their daughter behaving strangely.
As KSBW 8 first reported, the parents had ordered apple juice for their daughter, and the drink arrived in an ordinary lidded juice cup — nothing about it looked out of place. The girl drank from it normally until her behavior became alarming: she grew wobbly, slurred her words, and struggled to keep her balance. When Valencia looked into the cup, she found a brownish-red liquid that gave off a strong smell of alcohol, and the parents confirmed their fear by smelling and tasting it themselves.
“She was swaying, she was falling over, she was leaning on walls, she couldn’t hold her head up, she was slurring her words,” Valencia said of her intoxicated toddler.
The family rushed the little girl to the Salinas Valley emergency room, where staff measured her blood alcohol content at 0.12 — a level that, for context, is well above the 0.08 legal driving limit set for adults. For a child of that size, such a reading is extremely dangerous.
The restaurant’s manager later acknowledged the mistake, explaining that the toddler had been served house-made cooking wine. The wine had been stored in a large container labeled “apple juice” before service, and a server poured it into the child’s cup believing it was the real thing.
Shaken by what happened, Valencia urged other parents to be cautious — to smell and taste their children’s food and drinks before handing them over. “Take proper precautions on how you store things and label things properly so that this doesn’t happen to anybody else,” she said. She has called on Fujiyama to adopt stronger labeling guidelines and storage protocols to prevent a repeat.
The toddler has since recovered. The California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control opened a review of the incident alongside local law enforcement, examining how a container of cooking wine ended up mislabeled and within reach of the kitchen’s juice service.
The case is an unsettling echo of earlier mix-ups elsewhere in the country — most notably a Michigan Applebee’s that served a 15-month-old margarita mix from a mislabeled container, leaving the boy with a blood alcohol level of 0.10 — a pattern that has prompted calls across the restaurant industry for tighter beverage-handling rules. For more strange and cautionary stories, browse our Odd News section.
