Heavenly Valley Faces Court Case Over a Hot Chocolate Served to a Five-Year-Old

It is, on the surface, the simplest of transactions: a mother orders a hot chocolate for her young daughter at a mountain café. What happened next at Heavenly Mountain Resort's Sky Deck café two winters ago has now landed one of Lake Tahoe's most prestigious ski resorts in court — and reopened a debate about duty of care, beverage temperatures, and who bears responsibility when something goes badly wrong on a family ski day.

A lawsuit filed in El Dorado County Superior Court by Brittany Burns and Joshua Moran Burns of San Francisco alleges that negligence on the part of a service worker at Heavenly Mountain Resort in South Lake Tahoe led to their young daughter being scalded with a hot chocolate beverage. The child was five years old at the time. The lawsuit claims the cashier sprayed whipped cream on top of the drink and then slid it, without a lid, directly to the child at the takeout window. When she attempted to drink it, the liquid spilled inside her ski suit, scalding her chest and abdomen.

The consequence was far more serious than a momentary fright. "She suffered bad burns down her chest and abdomen," said Roger Dreyer, the Sacramento-based personal injury attorney representing the Burns family. The youngster has been left with permanent scars from the incident.

The Burns family's legal case rests on what their attorney describes as a straightforward failure of basic care. The drink was presented without a lid — directly to a child — and the complaint alleges it was served at a temperature that rendered it fundamentally dangerous.

The lawsuit characterises the hot chocolate as "far too hot for consumption and dangerous, especially to minors," and claims that serving such a beverage to a child constitutes conduct that was "known, intentional, malicious, and without due care for the likelihood of injury." The resort and its staff, the complaint states, "knew and should have known that such hot beverages posed a great hazard of causing just this type of incident and injuries."

Dreyer was characteristically blunt in articulating where the line lies. "You're not assuming they'll cook the hot chocolate to a temperature that's not consumable to a human being," he said. The argument is elegant in its simplicity: visitors to ski resorts accept that skiing carries risk. Ordering a hot drink from a café does not. Scalding your child is not, the family contends, one of the hazards that comes with the mountain.

The family is seeking compensation for damages including medical expenses, past and future mental suffering, and loss of enjoyment in life.

One detail in the complaint is particularly striking, and it transforms what might otherwise seem like an ordinary hot drinks dispute into something more complex. The liquid did not simply spill. It spilled inside the child's ski suit — insulated, form-fitting, and designed to keep cold out — which in this case kept scalding hot liquid in, trapping it against the girl's skin and compounding the injury significantly.

This detail is central to understanding the severity of the burns. A child spilling a warm drink in a restaurant might suffer minor discomfort. A child wearing a sealed ski suit, in which the same liquid is suddenly contained and held against her torso, faces a materially different outcome. The suit's construction — a selling point in any other context — became, in this moment, the mechanism of harm.

It also, in legal terms, raises questions about whether a mountain resort café, serving hot beverages to an overwhelmingly skiwear-clad clientele, should have specific protocols around temperature and lidding that go beyond standard café practice.

Heavenly Mountain Resort is owned by Vail Resorts, the Colorado-based giant that operates some of the most prominent ski destinations in North America. A spokesperson for Vail Resorts said the company was unable to comment on pending litigation.

According to the court docket, Vail and Heavenly Mountain Resorts filed a cross complaint in July of last year, a procedural step that opens the possibility of the resort seeking to apportion responsibility to other parties. The case is set to go to trial sometime next winter.

The Burns case does not exist in isolation. The history of American civil litigation is littered with hot beverage cases, and the legal precedents are both well-established and commercially significant for any company serving drinks.

Perhaps the most famous example is the 1994 case of Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants, in which 79-year-old Stella Liebeck was awarded $2.7 million in punitive damages after a jury found McDonald's liable for injuries she sustained after spilling hot coffee on herself. The case, widely mocked at the time as a symbol of litigious excess, has been substantially rehabilitated in public understanding since then — the burns Liebeck suffered were severe and the coffee temperature well above industry norms, and the case did eventually prompt meaningful changes in how fast food chains manage beverage temperatures.

More recently, a California delivery driver was awarded $50 million in March 2025 after being seriously burned by a Starbucks drink. That ruling was followed by at least two further lawsuits against the same company from drivers who suffered injuries when drinks slipped in their laps. Dunkin' Donuts, Starbucks, and even Southwest Airlines have all faced legal action over hot beverages in the past two decades, and the cumulative effect of these cases has been to sharpen corporate awareness — and legal exposure — around the serving temperature and lidding of hot drinks.

For ski resorts, the Burns lawsuit carries implications that extend beyond the courtroom. Mountain cafés and mid-slope eateries are high-volume, often rushed environments, serving predominantly families with young children who are taking breaks from physical exertion in cold conditions. Hot drinks are among the most popular items sold, and the clientele is almost universally dressed in the kind of insulated, sealed outerwear that would maximise the consequences of exactly the kind of spillage that occurred at the Sky Deck café.

Whether Heavenly Mountain ultimately prevails in court or not, the case is already prompting a question that resort food and beverage operators across the industry should be asking: what specific protocols do we have for serving scalding liquids to children, and are they sufficient?