Stick a fork in it
Before you whine about kid-friendly restaurants, consider this. By Shanthini Naidoo
IT’S enough to make a foodie vomit into her liquorice foam. Family restaurant. Feasts of lumo tomato sauces, uninspired burgers, store-bought pastas and house wines that taste suspiciously like a mix of leftover dregs with hints of saliva. Raging children on sugar and excitement highs that might encourage someone to take a walk in the traffic.
We once invited newlyweds to such a pizza/pasta joint with the best play centre in town. We have not seen them since they ran screaming from the floury sauce, chaos and bright colours, back to the civility of Sandton Square.
They did suggest that, next time, we could go somewhere neutral, because surely there are decent restaurants that do not actively cater for children but will let them in?
Sure, there are. But here are a few things childless diners should know about kids at non-kid-friendly restaurants. When feeding them, we might use a safety device called a high chair. It’s a kind of food prison for our child, but not safe for you. You are likely to trip over sprawled safety legs en route to the buffet, it will give you eye-level contact with our munchkin who may blow raspberries at you, and it will likely crowd your eating space.
Then our little angels will get bored because there is no germy play centre where they can work off that high-carb meal; nor are there on-site babysitters.
So they may throw food at you, squishy food if they are of the younger variety. Or they may grab the salt shaker off your table and throw that at you, which will delight them and horrify us.
We will pretend we’ve never seen them do it before.
Some, with smaller sprogs, will have to do nappy changes between meals. We will scrape our chairs, make a noisy retreat, possibly argue about whose turn it is. And the same on return.
If they are older, their parents will determine how well they are behaved and how many times they kick the table leg until it is time to go home.
As for the parents’ behaviour, we glug wine and gulp food. It is not for lack of etiquette, we were once civilised too. We are likely hurriedly feeding ourselves before bath-, bedor bottle-time.
Oh, and there will be food debris on the floor, so be careful not to slip. — @ShantzN