Hillel Cooperman of [Tastingmenu](http://www.tastingmenu.com/) has posted an amazing treatise on taking kids to restaurants. Everything he says is a shining nugget of truth, especially this:
> The moment you walk into a restaurant with your children an invisible timer starts ticking. You can’t see this timer so you have no idea how much time you have left until it rings. But trust me, it will go off. And when it does, your child will become unmanageable and you will have to leave the restaurant.
In our experience, at least, certain ages are much better for restaurant outings than others. We took newborn Iris out for Thai food many times, and she slept in the Baby Bjorn. At five months, we wouldn’t have taken Iris to McDonald’s, even if we liked McDonald’s: she only napped well at home, couldn’t eat a fry, and couldn’t claw her way out of a ball crawl for money.
Depending on the temperament of your baby, you may find, like we did, that just under a year old is an awesome time to take a baby to a restaurant. They’re interested in everything, haven’t really developed any food dislikes, and there’s plenty of time between naps. Around this time, we first took Iris for sushi, and she ate tempura, spicy tuna roll, eel, mackerel, and everything else we ordered. All this with two teeth.
That was the high point. Things are a little trickier now. On Tuesday we all went to a rather swanky Vietnamese restaurant, Tamarind Tree. We got a table near a crackling fireplace and ordered a bunch of dishes, like duck noodle soup, braised clay-pot fish, stir-fried green beans and tofu, crispy rice cakes with shrimp, salad rolls with pork meatballs, and *bo la lot,* which is ground beef wrapped in a fragrant leaf and fried.
Iris did okay. She ate a bunch of the rice cake (which was pretty damn good) and the tofu. (“Iris eating a tofu and a big tofu!”) She rejected the fish, even though it was sweet and tender and I’m sure she would have loved it a few months ago. In her defense, she was on the verge of a bad cold. Mostly she wanted to check out the fire, the christmas tree (which now that I think about it was rather alarmingly close to the fire) and other decorations.
The only advice I can think to add to Hillel’s recommendations is: become regulars at a Chinese restaurant. I’ll tell you about ours in a future post.
Oh, I thought the food at Tamarind Tree was pretty good, albeit greasy. But nobody’s interested in what *I* think anymore; the only food critic of any renown in this family is easy for restaurateurs to spot, because she’s 2'6".
I agree that certain ages are better than others for kids and restaurants, but Hillel Cooperman is on crack: We’ve been bringing our son to restaurants for almost his entire three-year life, and have never had to make a break for it because he’d become “unmanageable.” (One tip: Don’t break out the Fisher-Price people until after the entertainment value of putting ice in a sippy cup has waned.) I realize he’s exceptionally well-behaved and fond of restaurants, but exceptions like him are why not to use the second person in articles like this.
Hey, Neil. I don’t think Hillel is saying kids are little monsters. If his advice doesn’t apply to you, that’s because, like you said, you’re exceptionally lucky. It’s like if he said, “Your child will get an ear infection,” and it turns out your kid doesn’t get one.
Also, I think you’re just jealous because Hillel Cooperman’s life was so memorably adapted for the small screen by John Ritter.
Is he the guy who wrote “Eight Simple Rules for Eating My Teenage Daughter”?
Anyway, I think I reacted so strongly to this because it could lead parents to think that kids are just hard-wired to explode after a set amount of time, so the only way of avoiding disaster is to make sure dinner never drops below 50 mph. Different kids are, well, different, and there are things you can try to maximize their tolerance. (Mostly getting them used to restaurants at an early age, and bringing lots of distractions – though I guess at some Piagetan stage they acquire Bribery.) Learning to dine quickly is certainly a good skill, but I don’t think it’s the only useful one here.
When John & Fahmi pop their sprog, I’m getting the kid a Blackberry a 0th birthday gift. That oughta hold its attention.
(that should, of course, have been “for its 0th birthday gift.” wine + blog commenting != coherence)