They are often inappropriately loud. In a happily bustling restaurant, they are self-absorbed and oblivious to others and their needs. They really need to grow up. More than once when I was dining at an upscale, expensive restaurant, I’ve been irritated enough to ask a server to intervene and insist on appropriate behavior. I admit that I even silently hoped they would be asked to exit the eatery, posthaste.
The only solution is to ban the brats. Kick out those obnoxious parents who allow their children to behave in ways that we would never tolerate from an adult. If I could, I’d let the children stay with adult supervision. I’d feed the kids a good meal (and not from an abominable “Kids’ Menu”) and teach them about dining behavior and food while they were busy having fun.
An upscale restaurant in Mooresville, North Carolina, recently announced that it was banning kids under 5 after repeated incidents of inappropriate behavior. After the announcement, reservations at the eatery increased from 50 to 80 per day even as some parents howled about discrimination.
While savvy young diners are out there, we just tend to notice the kids who throw creamed spinach against the steakhouse wall.
Why should well-behaved parents and their offspring have to suffer because of a few offenders who disrupt everyone else’s meal?
Who am I to tell anyone how to parent?
I don’t consider my experience as the parent of a now 23-year-old son as being remotely typical. I was a food editor and columnist when Hans was a baby, and he was exposed to a world of cuisines at home. As a kid he encountered everything from frogs’ legs to masala dosas.
When I became a dining critic, he started going out to dinner with us. Kids arrive as they are, and we were blessed with a child who was even-tempered and self-contained from the start. Hans had his moments but never was the kind to bounce off the walls. We enjoyed talking to him while I pretended I wasn’t reviewing the eatery. He would even wrinkle his nose at the children at other tables who weren’t behaving.
Even he knew that it’s not cute when your kids run from table to table nor is it precious when Junior screams at the top of his lungs. Your tot’s antics are only momentarily amusing to other diners.
You do your child a disservice when you ignore them around the table. Besides being some of the best together times we can share, meals are where we learn how to be human and live in a family and a community.
I’m not telling you how to parent… but I do have a few suggestions to prepare your kids for dining out:
• Start kids out with dining at places that are loud by nature, including fast, casual outlets. Try dining at one of Boulder’s naturally noisy brewpubs and tasting rooms with food trucks parked outside. Then you can move up to sushi bars, bistros and trattoria.
• If your offspring has a serious meltdown as all kids do, deal with it. Take them outside for a bit. If that doesn’t help, take the food and run and live to dine another day.
• Be prepared. That’s the motto of a true parent. By all means bring games, etc. to entertain but also have an iron-clad rule. All devices including your own are powered off and put out of sight at least until dessert. They won’t take it seriously if you don’t, just as kids won’t eat asparagus unless they see you loving it.
• Overly hungry and super-tired kids do not make good dining companions. Parents deserve a painful thumbs down if they head to the bistro anyway under those circumstances. Call out for delivery instead.
• Instill a sense of “indoor” versus “outdoor” voice, or as I like to think of it: “Flagstaff House voice” vs. “Mountain Sun Brewpub voice.” Consider sitting on a patio where noise matters less.
• Limit the dining time. Where a 10-year-old kid might be able deal with a two-hour, multi-course dinner, it’s unrealistic to expect more than an hour out of most 5-year-olds.
Restaurants are challenged as a new generation of parents take younger children out to dine much more frequently. However, they have to do a better job of dealing with brats. “Does customer service training need to involve lawyers?” Restaurant Hospitality magazine recently asked after noting recent incidents. “At a breakfast spot, guests clashed after a 3-year-old was allowed to roam through the restaurant and a misguided cashier suggested that the parents ‘put a leash on it,’” according to the magazine. The cashier was wrong to say it but the sentiment is one that many diners mutter to themselves.
Finally, to all the irritated diners: Lighten up, please. Allow for some random humanity and childish glee to infiltrate your foodie experience. You were probably not the perfect little diner, either. Let’s eat.
(I welcome comments on kids and dining from parents, kids, restaurateurs and diners at [email protected]. I will pass along some of the comments anonymously in an upcoming Nibbles column.)
How to lick tamales and flan
On April 20, the U.S. Postal Service released its first six-stamp series of 49 cent stamps featuring Central and South American, Mexican and Caribbean foods. The illustrations celebrate tamales, flan, sancocho, empanadas, chile rellenos and ceviche. The least familiar dish of the group, sancocho, is a dinner soup featuring large pieces of meat and vegetables with national variations spanning the Caribbean and South America. Popularity means you get four tamales and four flans but only three each of the other stamps. Now, if the glue just tasted like the dishes they portray.
Taste of the Week
A chill night called for the regular Thursday special at Boulder Beer’s brewpub. Smoked prime rib, thinly sliced, dripping with au jus and served on a bun with horseradish cream. It was perfectly balanced by Boulder Beer’s Shake Chocolate Porter. Also worth checking out: Fried cauliflower served hot wing-style drenched in your choice of sauces.
Words to Chew On
“The best kind of (table) manners are not a structure of domination, but an awareness of other people, and a wish to put them at ease, to help them feel good about themselves.” -— The Sex Life of Food (St. Martin’s Press) by Bunny Crumpacker.
John Lehndorff is a former cook (for one shift) at The Sink in Boulder. John Lehndorff hosts Radio Nibbles at 8:25 a.m. Thursdays on KGNU (88.5 FM, 1390 AM, kgnu.org).
