Racist ice cream? French cafe pulls ‘Chinese’ and ‘African’ desserts after outcry
- ‘Chinese’ lemon sorbet features yellow head with pointy hat and thinly drawn eyes, while chocolate ‘African’ counterpart is decorated with thick red lips
- Owners say items were already on menu when they took over in 1986, ‘but past history has made the France of today’
The “African” ice cream dessert was topped by a chocolate-covered meringue ball decorated with thick red lips. The “Chinese” lemon sorbet had a yellow meringue head, with thinly drawn eyes and wearing a pointy hat.
A cafe on France’s Cote d’Azur is now pulling both desserts from its menu, responding to accusations of racism.
A July 20 tweet calling for a boycott of Le Poussin Bleu (The Blue Chick) in Saint-Raphaël for its “racist” ice creams had by Tuesday got tens of thousands of likes and retweets.
In a response on Facebook titled “the African and the Chinese struck down by social networks”, the cafe owners said they were expunging the ice creams from their menu “after this storm of violence and insults”.
The ice creams were already on the menu when the current owners in 1986 took over the cafe opened in 1947.
“We are not ‘racist.’ We respect everyone!” they wrote in their Facebook post.