The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Should we have an ‘unruly children’ tax?
An American pizzeria has left parents “shocked and appalled” after it introduced (and implemented) a surcharge for unruly children. The Toccoa River Restaurant in Georgia, added $50 (£40) to the bill that Lyndsey and Kyle Landmann accrued in the company of friends, 11 of whom were aged between three and eight and who were either demonic or angelic, depending on who you ask.
It could only happen in America. And I don’t mean the fine, but the parents’ righteous indignation on receiving it. Because the British are already acutely, squirmingly, aware of just how catastrophically our children’s table manners measure up when we take them out of the zoo (sorry, home). Remember French Children Don’t Throw Food, the book that forensically dissected the inadequacies of both the palates and public deportment of our progeny? We went mad for it, putting it straight to the top of The Sunday Times bestsellers list.
Kids, we have accepted with a masochistic relish that only a royally repressed culture could muster, will be kids. They will insist on being both seen and heard. And in restaurants – worst of all foreign ones, when our children can be compared with their chic European cousins – this will make you want to put your head into the sous-chef’s sousvide. It is inevitable. Unavoidable. Simply the price you pay for someone else doing the washing up.
On holiday last year, I ate (or attempted to eat) next to a table of children who stood to shovel their supper into their mouths with their hands. Fine had it been fries. Less so given that it was spaghetti. More power to them in a McDonald’s, where pretty much everyone is there to refuel and run. Not so much in the fine dining room of a Four Seasons hotel, where the average age of fellow diners lapped theirs by several decades, and some had likely remortgaged their homes in order to eat, just once, from the prix-fixe menu.
And this is why the whole question of whether kids ruin restaurants – though it pops up again and again in the news with all the irrepressible predictability of Nigel Farage – is a red herring.
Reasonable rambunctiousness is fair play in family-friendly pubs, fast-food joints, or pretty much any place that’s piping loud pop through the dining room. But if the atmosphere is hushed and the majority of your fellow diners are wearing ties or hearing aids, it’s just not cricket. Or, more importantly, it’s just not kind. The same applies from Paris to Peterborough. You don’t have to be Super Nanny to fathom the psychology or sort your strategy.
There is, though, some behaviour for which there’s no excuse. Not even the excitement of a holiday, when rules relax, sugar levels spike and bedtimes go back. “They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off… they vomit,” summarised the mayor of one Cretan holiday destination awash with British families. He wasn’t talking about our children. The manners of our minors may not travel well, but they cannot hold (or throw) a candle to those of the fully matured Brit Abroad.
From Turkey to Spain, Brits demand sausages, beans, brown sauce and bacon to be served as we sizzle ourselves in the sun. We wash it all down with so much booze that, last year, all-inclusives in Magaluf had to limit us to six-drinks a day. Our grownup deportment is so deplorable that the president of Lanzarote recently revealed a plan designed to keep us not only out of its cafés, but off its soil, and to attract “higher-quality” German tourists instead.
So if restaurants really want to tackle our uncouth behaviour by tax, bad parenting in the hospitality world should be less of the focus than bad adulting.