Metro

Mom said she was booted from Midtown chocolate shop for breastfeeding her baby

Talk about lactose intolerance.

A female manager allegedly threw a Manhattan mother out of a Midtown chocolate shop for breastfeeding her baby there – leaving the mom so traumatized that she hasn’t been able to feed her child in public since.

Now the mad mom, Julia Acevedo-Taylor, is suing Lily O’Brien’s Chocolate Cafe for causing her “severe embarrasment, severe shame, severe humiliation, severe emotional distress and loss of dignity.”

In papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, Taylor says she and pal Latasha Augustoplos had stopped off at the Bryant Park cafe for a bite to eat last August when their kids started demanding food as well.

“Taylor and Augustoplos began nursing their hungry and tired toddlers,” the suit says, and “positioned [them] with their heads toward their respective bodies.”

“[N]o part of either the plaintiff’s nor Augustoplos’s nipples were exposed” – and there would have been nothing legally wrong with that had they been while feeding their kids – but that didn’t stop the chiding chocolate shop manager from coming over and telling the women to “stop doing that,” the suit says.

Taylor “politely declined” the request, the suit says, telling the manager what she was asking was and “both contrary to sound public policy and illegal.”

The manager, however, was umoved, and “again demanded, this time in a threatening manner, that . . . Taylor and Augustoplos cease nursing” their kids, the suit says.

The women “again politely declined the request,” and the manager then ordered them to “leave and never come back to [the] establishment again,” the suit says.

Taylor “felt shamed and humiliated in front of her friends and other patrons who witnessed the event. She tearfully gathered her belongings” and left with her five-month-old daughter Jordan, the suit says.

Ever since, the suit says, Taylor “has been unable to breast-feed her child in places of public accomodation, as her experience at O’Brien’s has left her feeling inhibited from nursing her child. These feelings of inhibition result in severe anxiety whenever [Taylor] contemplates nursing her child outside the privacy of her home.”

Taylor’s lawyer, Adam Polo, said his client’s suing because she wants to send a message and “make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Manager Cathal Queally denied it happened the first time – he said the “since removed” female general manager had simply asked Taylor to cover-up some.

“Certainly no one was ever thrown out of our cafe for breastfeeding,” he said, noting the shop is “a mother-daughter business.”

According to the store’s website, store founder Mary Ann O’Brien started making chocolates at her Irish countryside home in 1992, and her “beautiful baby girl” Lily was her chief taster. The New York cafe opened last March.