Many employees are applauded for pouring their blood, sweat and tears into their work, but a waitress who works at a cafe in Hokkaido, Japan, has been fired for taking it too literally.

The Mondaiji Con Cafe Daku, loosely translated as the Problem Child Dark Cafe, on April 2 announced that it had dismissed an employee for adding her blood to a cocktail – reportedly at the request of a customer.

The cafe’s management apologised, saying on Twitter that her action was “absolutely not acceptable”.

Opened in March in the Susukino entertainment district of Sapporo city, the concept cafe’s gimmick is to hire “mentally unstable” and “problematic” girls as waitresses wearing dark, goth-style make-up.

Customers pay 2,500 yen (S$25) an hour to drink all they want.

The cafe tweeted that it shut its doors for a day to replace the drinking glasses at its premises.

“Drinking the blood of other people is an extremely dangerous act,” Dr Zento Kitao told Japanese news site Flash, which first reported the incident at the cafe.

“Cases of people getting infected from drinking another person’s blood are rare, but major diseases can be transmitted through blood, including HIV, Hepatitis C, Hepatitis B and syphilis. If there are wounds in the mouth, it is easy to be infected by blood transmissions.”

He added that medical personnel themselves treated the handling of blood very carefully, taking measures such as wearing eye guards during operations to avoid patients’ blood from splattering into doctors’ eyes.

Dr Kitao said the dismissed employee and customers who drank her blood-infused cocktails should take a blood test.

One commenter summed up the situation on a message board: “Cafe using only problem children turned out to be too much of a problem.”