Cafe sorry for poor-taste Oscar joke

A joke in poor taste has landed a Wellington cafe in hot water.

Scorch-O-rama fielded at least a dozen complaints in person and on social media following a joke on its receipt making light of South African athlete Oscar Pistorius' killing of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.

"Oscar Pistorius was super keen to get a new bathroom door, but his girlfriend was dead against it," ran the joke printed on receipts from Wednesday until complaints started flooding in yesterday.

"Your ‘joke' about the killing of a woman in an incident of domestic violence just ended our family tradition of starting and ending our rides around the peninsula at Scorching Bay," Anita Easton posted on the Scorching Bay company's Facebook page.

"Making jokes on receipts about domestic violence and murder make this establishment no better than the ‘whites only' racist and misogynist American diners of the 50s. IT IS NOT OKAY!" wrote Shauna Ray Ratapu.

Cafe owner Keith Morrison said he removed the joke from all receipts as soon as a customer complained at midday yesterday.

The woman took a photo of the joke, however, and it spread quickly on Twitter, leading to two upset phone calls, one from Melbourne, Morrison said.

Morrison posted an apology on Facebook and had donated $1000 to Women's Refuge.

"Sometimes our brains are the last thing to engage, when they should be the first.

"We truly are sorry and removed it as soon as we had that vital moment of awareness," he wrote.

"We apologise again for any hurt or distress we caused people - it was absolutely never our intention."

Morrison said he strongly objected to suggestions his staff were unsafe in their workplace.

"People are saying 'are my staff in an environment that isn't safe'. Come on. It's ridiculous to infer that, but I understand," he said.