Death to the kiddie menu! 6 June 2007 12:11 am
Posted by Tracy in : books,cooking,eating,food snobbery,Marion Nestle,Morning Glory,news,restaurants,work , trackbackI’m not kidding. After careful consideration and rereading of certain choice sections of the completely fantastic What to Eat by Marion Nestle, as well as a recent New York Times article on the subject called Don’t Point That Menu at My Child, Please (thanks Mom!), I have come to the conclusion that restaurants everywhere would be performing an enormous public service by destroying their special kid food menus and adding more small dishes (appetizers, sides, and half-portions) to their offerings — and not just because most menus feature a dire lack of portion sizes other than “freaking huge,” although that last is a problem, too.
I can’t remember ever ordering from a kid’s menu. Instead I have fond memories of going out to dinner at a “grownup” restaurant, ordering an appetizer and making a meal of it (I also remember that my little plate of deep-fried mozzerella sticks was garnished with kale, which I ate, perhaps because after all that fat I was starving for anything green, but that’s probably another story). I still do this at restaurants, especially if the people I’m with are up for making a meal of appetizers and smaller dishes. One of my favorite things about Iraila (something I was happy to discuss in my interview with their head chef, Mark Zolun) is that their menu includes a whole page of “small plates.” So awesome!
Likewise, I’m happy to report that Morning Glory does not have a special children’s menu, but rather that we will, on request, make kid-size portions of just about any menu item it’s possible to divide (obviously, we can’t go smaller than one egg white for some dishes). Hell, at my shift on Sunday we even made an exception to half-waffles and made some kid a quarter-waffle, and Celeste got to make up a price. Of course, at a corporate restaurant with automated ordering systems, that last would have been an utter nightmare to work out, which just serves as a reminder that
- my job rules
- it’s okay to make special requests at restaurants, before you order, but you’ve got to be willing to pay for them, and if your special request is impossible, then you smile and say “oh well” and move on with your and everybody else’s life, and of course tip your server really well.
But I digress. Back to the kiddie menu, a concept that will (metaphorically at least) be one of the first up against the wall when the TracyFood revolution comes. I don’t remember everything we offered “for kids” at The Glenwood, but I remember that there were five kiddie breakfasts and five kiddie lunches. The breakfasts (including “green eggs and ham,” colored with pesto like the one mentioned in the Times article) weren’t so bad — they were basically just smaller portions of the adult breakfasts, many of which were in fact ridiculously huge. We occasionally did mini-waffles as a special favor, too. The kid lunch/dinner items, on the other hand, never failed to offend me. I remember peanut butter and jelly, a grilled cheese sandwich, a quesadilla (grilled cheese on a tortilla! fancy!), and the worst menu item ever, the “cheese log” — shredded cheese rolled up in a flour tortilla and melted in the microwave. Dear readers, you cannot imagine how much I wish I was making that last one up. Every time I got a ticket back for that damn thing I cursed a blue streak as long as my arm, and on at least one occasion one of the other cooks in the kitchen looked at me and actually said, “But it’s for a kid.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said, or something even less polite. Marion Nestle is more eloquent and articulate in What to Eat:
You would never know it by going to a supermarket, but children are supposed to eat the same foods their parents eat. Dietary recommendations, such as the [USDA] Dietary Guidelines and pyramid food guide, apply to everyone over the age of two. Once children are past infancy and can chew and swallow foods without choking (which usually happens by age two), they should be eating the same healthy foods that everyone else in the family is eating — just less of them and with a few minor modifications: leave out the salt, sugars, and peppery spices; mash the foods or cut them into small pieces and make sure the foods are well moistened so children will not choke on them. (370)
Hallelujah and amen. My parents used a food mill to turn parts of their dinners into homemade baby food for me and my brother, and we both grew up happy and healthy and much less picky about food than a lot of kids our age. Now I think we were all kinds of lucky, especially when I think about godawful restaurant kids menus and the way food gets marketed to kids (one of Dr. Nestle’s biggest hot button issues, to be sure — here’s a quick summary version of her rant she wrote for The Nation awhile back, and some other big names have stuff to say, too). These days I no longer claim to be less picky, mostly because I reserve the right (not) to eat crap as I see fit, and that includes generic, insipid grown-up versions of kiddie menu offerings. Gah.
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janelle
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mom
