Diner baby ban is food for thought

If you must bring your toddler out to dinner, there are a few basic rules, and welcoming venues, says Caroline Delaney

SCREECHING, insisting on tasting the food on all the other plates at the table, laughing, hiccupping, up and down to the bathroom 20 times, cracking up at jokes about willies and asking for food that isn’t on the menu.

No wonder restaurateur Nick Munier wants to ban hen and stag parties. Oh wait, he doesn’t? He wants to ban children under two, the ones who sup milk and nod off while snuggled into a corner.

Munier doesn’t want to ban babies outright — he wants them gone by 6pm. He’s confused about who causes the most disruption.

I brought my son to a restaurant for an evening meal. Being four months old, he drank warm milk until he passed out, so we tucked him up cosily in his car seat, and brought him into the restaurant where he sat under our table — the waitress didn’t know he was there until we paid.

That son is now nearly six and these days I prefer to give him a ‘picnic lunch’ in the garden. He’s lively, giddy and full of questions on everything from the creation of the world to dog poo. I don’t care about a restaurant’s rules but I wouldn’t bring him and his three-year-old sister to an expensive restaurant in the evening. They know how to use cutlery, are toilet-trained and prefer real food to chicken nuggets. But they would not appreciate a main course costing €29 — such as Munier’s restaurant offers. I won’t relax and enjoy a meal like that if I’m stifling their noisy giggles and questions while making sure they eat enough to ensure I get value for money.

Restaurants, especially upmarket ones, should be for people who know how to behave in public. So a list of banned people should include slurpy chewers; guffawing mobile phone users and people who should ‘just get a room’.

When I am dining child-free, I like menus with words like ‘jus’, ‘drizzled’, ‘compote’, ‘feuilleté’ and ‘en croute’. But when I am in the company of children, I prefer somewhere that offers crayons while we wait for our food to arrive; somewhere the open-kitchen chefs don’t mind being stared at while they toss the pizza dough in the air; somewhere with plenty of room between the tables. I want the food delivered promptly on plates that don’t cost a fortune, to a table that doesn’t have fancy candles and artfully arranged orchids.

Children are unlikely to turn into adults who know how to behave properly in restaurants unless they see the inside of one once in a while. There are child-friendly places to train them in first, though. Anyone having a weekend lunch in places such as Milano or Wagamama can expect to see dozens of high-chairs in use. But relaxed staff, who expect to be dealing with mini-customers and who are equipped to cope with accidental spills, make it an enjoyable experience for the kids, parents and child-free diners alike.

While on holiday in France, we went to one restaurant where a waitress was either being vindictive or didn’t have children and didn’t know how sibling rivalry works — she sprinkled Smarties and lit a little sparkler on top of one child’s crepe because he said ‘bonjour’ to her. The other child got a plain crepe. At least it was plain ... initially.

Other than that, we’ve been lucky and the worst that’s happened has been a spilt glass of water. But not because our children are little angels — it’s more likely because we follow a few basic rules of bringing children to restaurants:

* Get your order in before they are absolutely ravenous.

* Go somewhere that has fairly basic food that will be served reasonably quickly.

* Bring something to distract or entertain the kids — preferably not a noisy electronic toy.

* Don’t bring them out at a time when they would normally be dressed in their PJs.

Adults who jab at their teeth with toothpicks; buffoons who think everyone wants to hear about how hilarious they were yesterday, and people who think a menu is a rough guide to what they would like to order are all annoying as fellow diners, too. However, they order from a full-priced menu, which I’d guess is part of the issue here.

I don’t particularly care if the sight of a child with their fork in the ‘wrong hand’ annoys someone sitting at another table. But if I’ve got a babysitter for my kids and a reservation at a fancy restaurant, then I certainly don’t want to listen to a child whining from boredom or shrieking because the peas touched their meat.

So, thanks to Mr Munier for his ban — and maybe he’ll consider extending it to many other types of irritating customers.

And that annoying hen party I mentioned at the start — why didn’t I complain to the restaurant manager?

Simple, a very good friend was the bride and I was one of the 20 ‘hens’.