Nosh Pit

New Dining Trend? PA restaurant bans babies

Are more no-kid policies on the way?

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Jul 11, 2011 at 08:38AM 2 Comments

Baby ban: Another restaurant says no to kids at the table.

Photo: Family Guy/Fox Broadcasting Company

It takes three to make a trend, we’re told. So perhaps it’s premature to wonder if kid bans are the new farm to table (something, please be the new farm to table so that we don’t have to say “farm to table” any more.) Still, with news this morning from WTAE Pittsburgh by way of Eater National that a restaurant in Monroeville, Pennsylvania will no longer serve children under six, you have to wonder: Will we be seeing more baby bans around the country?

“Nothing wrong with babies, but the fact is you can’t control their volume,” the restaurant owner told WTAE. “There may be restaurants that prefer to cater to such things. Not here.”

Earlier this year, Top Chef alum Dale Levitski made headlines when he introduced a kid-free brunch at Sprout in Chicago. I wrote a story asking local restaurants if such a policy would work in Seattle, and an interesting debate sprung up in the comments section.

“I would never eat somewhere that tried this,” wrote Chef’s Wife. “Look, I’m the wife of a chef and a restaurant owner; I get it. But a restaurant doesn’t haven’t to become Chucky [SIC] Cheese. It’s possible to be food-forward and kid-friendly, and I think that’s what Seattle restaurant patrons want.”

Larry had a different take: “It seems many parents (not all) think that just because they popped out a couple kids that it gives them the right to haul them anywhere and ruin other people’s experiences.”

While reporting the article, I asked The Herbfarm’s Carrie Van Dyck to weigh in with her thoughts on kids and fine dining. I did not have the chance to include her remarks in the original story, but they showed up in a Nosh Pit post a few days later.

Van Dyck says it’s about each individual kid and whether or not they can handle the experience, but it seems like other restaurateurs are feeling less tolerant these days. Guess it remains to be seen whether bans will become widespread…and whether they’ll spread all the way here. Meantime, parents, here’s a list from restaurant critic Kathryn Robinson of local restaurants where kids should always be welcome.

Add a Comment »

Tags: Restaurants, Restaurant News, kids stuff, Family and Relationships, Family Friendly

Kids and Fine Dining: More Thoughts

Dale Levitski advises Seattle chefs to “be confident;” Herbfarm owner Carrie Van Dyck says it “depends on the kid.”

Posted by: Jessica Voelker on May 05, 2011 at 01:40PM 3 Comments

Dale Levitiski, banner of children.

For this month’s Seattle Met I wrote a story about Dale Levitski, chef at Chicago restaurant Sprout, and his policy of banning any child under 12 during weekend brunch (check out the article’s comments for a lively debate on the matter).

Here are two things that I couldn’t squeeze into the article but that I thought might interest you.

First, I asked Levitski what he would say to a Seattle chef who wanted to implement an adults-only brunch but was nervous about backlash. Here was his advice: “Be confident! The customer is not always right. This is your restaurant. You’ll take some bumps and bruises put people will come around.”

Secondly, I wasn’t able to include the conversation I had with Carrie Van Dyck. She owns fine-dining standard barer the Herbfarm with her husband Ron Zimmerman, and had some interesting insights to share.

“Depends on the kid,” was Van Dyck’s main message. Given the multi-hour meals at the restaurant, Van Dyck says that some children just can’t handle it. But, she says, she’s known (lucky) kids who have grown up eating at the Herbfarm and now bring their own families there. That said, Van Dyck admitted that kids between age 1 and 6 are always “questionable.” After age 6, “it depends on how they are raised.”

She wouldn’t tell me any dishy stories about young kids who tore up the Herbfarm while the parents sat idle, but Van Dyck did recall a time when a family brought a one-year-old baby who kept crying the whole evening. The Parents “had to keep getting up,” to sooth the baby, which distracted them from enjoying the meal.

And that, says Van Dyck, is the biggest problem that restaurateurs have with kids acting out of turn: it’s not the crying or the annoying other customers, it’s the fact that the behavior prevents their parents from enjoying the experience.

Oh and interesting factoid about the Herbfarm: the restaurant will actually make kid-friendly food—hamburgers, etc—upon request. Who knew?

Add a Comment »

Tags: Restaurant News, Brunch, Chefs, Family and Relationships

The Cookbooks of Our Lives

A cookbook with recipes that are inedible, and a value that is immeasurable.

Posted by: Kathryn Robinson on Mar 19, 2010 at 10:29AM 0 Comments

In this series, Seattle Met staff share the cookbooks that have shaped their lives. First Betty Crocker helped arts editor Laura Dannen keep her relationship balanced. Then style editor Laura Cassidy shared some rare finds, and senior editor James Ross Gardner saw his future in a single saucepan. This week, senior writer Kathryn Robinson remembers that sometimes the cookbooks we treasure most are the ones we should cook from least.

My husband is the food savant in our family, the one who can perform a quick inventory of an empty kitchen and whip a perfect dinner out of oatmeal, almond butter, and a dash of cream of tartar.

Me, I need a cookbook.

Professionally I can identify a successful meal at 60 paces. Personally I can assemble the edible components of a swell dinner party with a little notice. But that little-of-this, little-of-that sixth sense that true cooks possess—nope. This pretender needs instructions. And so I found myself a couple of weeks ago standing in my sister’s kitchen, pawing through her cookbooks. Being in the midst of a kitchen renovation—in part to give me a place to store mine—we stayed in her empty house for a week. They were due back from vacation and I wanted to greet them with a hot, edible thank-you.

She has a tall husband and two ravenous teenage athletes for sons, so I rejected as overly foofy a number of the books I treasured from my own collection—no thanks Ina Garten, no thanks Julee and Sheila. Never mind those silver palates. (Go check how many cookbooks you have in common with family members. Go on, do it. It’s uncanny.)

And then I saw it: The Ryther Cookbook, circa 1970-something. I had the same one, of course; all we siblings did. Our mother was a member of the same Ryther Guild from the day she left the UW sorority to the day she died—into their dotage she and the sorority sisters still called themselves The Campus Unit—and occasionally produced these cookbooks as fundraisers.

I pulled it down and scrolled through its familiar pages bound in cracking red plastic, its 70s housewife aesthetic all but fragrant on the page. Four different recipes contributed by four different familiar names, all for the same overnight cream-of-mushroom soup breakfast bake. Then there was the Pumpkin Chiffon Cake. Mary Ann’s Upside-Down Tamale Pie. Mock Green Goddess Dressing. And there was the classic “recipe” from my mom’s best friend: Table for two, 8pm, Canlis.

After careful consideration of which of Mom’s friends were likely to have contributed the least inedible recipes, I chose a hearty seafood lasagna, and was only momentarily put off when confronted with the abbreviation “1 ctr cottage cheese.” Hmm…container? To hell with specificity! This was the 1970s, when a container was a container! As I stood in the dairy aisle pondering the exciting explosion 40 years have brought to the container industry, I cast myself back to those days, trying hard to remember the size of the cottage cheese containers that used to propagate like bunnies in our Frigidaire. Oh yeah, I remembered. That size.

As we did dishes later, my sister poised the half-empty pan over the garbage and blurted, “Um…would you be hurt? Because that was…just…spectacularly…bad.” We burst out laughing, and she took the cookbook and scrawled in the margin beside the recipe: “Really SUCKS!!”

Then she lovingly tucked the cookbook back into its hole on the shelf, and I realized with a pang how priceless a collection of awful recipes can be. Priceless as the dented flour sifter, or the nicked garden trowel. Or a thimble for a finger much more delicate than my own.

Photo Source

Add a Comment »

Tags: DIY cooking, Cookbooks, Cooking, Family and Relationships