'Long Live the Nazis' spaghetti dish sold in Taiwan renamed after backlash
The restaurant's owner said she thought the name would help customers when choosing their meal
An Italian restaurant in Taiwan which named two of its sausage-filled dishes “Long Live the Nazis” has apologised after it was bombarded with complaints.
Tsao Ya-sin, the 24-year-old manager of the Rockmill restaurant in Banciao, New Taipei City, said she was sorry for her lack of sensitivity when naming the pizza and spaghetti meals containing German sausages.
She said that she had chosen the name to “help customers”.
“When we were deciding on a name for this pasta dish, it never occurred to us that the word Nazi would stir up such controversy,” Tsao told the Wall Street Journal.
She said that in the year that Rockmill’s had been selling the dish, it had proven one of its most popular dishes. The restaurant recently came under fire when a local TV station featured a story about its offensive dish titles.
Both the Israeli and German representative officers in Taiwan told the European Pressphoto Agency that they were shocked by the name of the dish, and said it showed a lack of understanding about history and the Nazis’ slaughter of Jews.
During the Holocaust, the Nazis killed approximately 15 million people, including Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and prisoners of war in Russia and Poland.
Following the uproar, Tsao said that she planned to rename her meals “World Champion” as soon as possible.
Rockmill’s mistake comes after a restaurant in Teipei displayed photographs of Nazi concentration camps on its walls in 2000. Its owner took down the images, saying he did not know they were offensive, the Tapei Times reported.