A furious mum has blasted a restaurant which demanded a full adult price for her nine-year-old daughter’s buffet meal.
Rebecca Fox, 30, said her daughter Atiya was left ‘upset’ after staff measured her height and told her she was too tall to qualify for the £5.99 set price for kids.
They said because she stood more than 140cms (four feet seven inches) she would have to pay for an adult meal costing £8.99.
Atiya is 150cm tall (four feet 11 inches) which is five inches taller than than the average nine year’s old height of 137.5cms (four feet six inches tall).
Ms Fox said she refused to pay the adult price for her daughter and walked out of the Nines Global Buffet restaurant at Cambridge Leisure Park.
The hairdresser assessor at Cambridge Regional College said: “I’m furious about it.
“Atiya is a tall girl, but she’s only nine, and she was very upset.
“There was some kind of a measuring tool next to the till, and the staff said that because she was taller than the rule, she didn’t qualify for the child rate, and that we’d have to pay for her as an adult.
“It’s not about the extra money, it’s simply that they wouldn’t accept she was a child.
“The staff just kept saying that they were completely in the right, which obviously they were not.”
Ms Fox, who also has a two-year-old daughter, Ruth, and 10-month-old daughter, Ava, said the family, who live at Haddenham, Cambs., had their day ruined.
The mother-of-three said: “We were going to go somewhere else, but Atiya was so upset, she kept saying, ‘what if they think I’m too tall there as well?’
The family tried to contact the company’s head office but have not received a satisfactory response.
Ms Fox asked the manager how much they would charge an adult who was under 140cm and this apparently fell on deaf ears.
A spokeswoman for Nines said: “We completely understand that people might be upset by this, but Nines is such a big restaurant, and gets so busy, that the rule needs to be in place.
“Customers can eat as much as they like once they have paid, and it’s sometimes difficult for staff on the door to differentiate between adults and children, so there has to be a means of regulating.
“Many buffet restaurants around the UK use this system because many children do not have proof of age.”
