Argh! I don't know what's come over me. Posting so infrequently now! I blame the postsecondary education series for requiring too much brain power and creating an activation energy hurdle. Obviously I need to start posting some recipes and quick links to limber up the ol' blogging tract.
Let's start with this link from a local foodie blog.
The more I eat out, write about eating out, and eat out with my family, the more I realize I'd never want to run a restaurant. The line between success and failure can be just one small thing.
That one thing, for my mom, was a $5 tiny glass of fresh squeezed orange juice.
My family visited from Chicago a couple weeks ago, and we took my parents, my kids, and my cousins to a restaurant in Minneapolis. The food was great, the hosts were gracious, I really enjoyed it.
There was a kids menu, reasonably priced at $6-$7, with delicious, fresh, wonderful food. But it didn't include a drink. My five-year-old asked for orange juice, and out came a little glass of freshly squeezed OJ.
It was probably 4 ounces. $5. I didn't think much of it—it's freshly squeezed, it probably took a couple oranges, what's an orange or two cost in October in Minnesota?
But when we left, my mom said, "I'd never go there again." I was surprised—she liked her food. I asked "Why?"
"Sammy's breakfast cost $12," she said. "$5 for an orange juice? You've got to be kidding me."
One small thing.
Something like this happened to H. and me once when we met for breakfast at a restaurant that I had suggested, midway between her house and mine, so that I could pick up her kids and babysit them for the day. I think that between us we had four or five kids by then. Anyway, we ordered orange juice for all the kids without looking at the menu, and it turned out that the OJ was 12-oz glasses of juice fresh-squeezed from the JUICE BAR at the back of the restaurant. Each juice was the cost you'd expect for a twelve-ounce orange juice freshly squeezed from organic oranges at the full-service juice bar.
No, the server did not warn us about this. No quick comment along the lines of, "Just to let you know, our OJ is pretty big — you might not want to give your two-year-old a whole one." No, it was "here's your menu, would you like any drinks to start?" and we said "juice for the kids" and that was that.
Don't get me wrong. I love my juice fresh-squeezed. But when the bill came I nearly fell over. I tried to hide it from H. (the restaurant had been my idea) but failed. I'm not sure if the babysitting that day was worth the cost of the juice!
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I have mixed feelings about kids' menus. I think it's good that there is something bland and simple available, because some kids just roll that way — the grilled cheese sandwich and apple sauce, the chicken nuggets, the small kids' pizza. That's life.
What I wish is that restaurant menus more often had a small-appetite portion of more of their "regular" food. For one thing, I'd love to offer my more adventurous eaters something more interesting than chicken nuggets, and I'd love to set the expectation that a six-year-old should be exploring foods more interesting than chicken nuggets.
For another thing, I'd order it myself. At places that do really good hamburgers, I quite often order the kid's size burger and fries and ask them to dress the burger as they would a "grownup one" — works great.
In theory, I love the idea of offering four ounces of freshly-squeezed OJ to my children. Kids do deserve high-quality food. You know what, though? As cheap-looking as it can be, I seriously think that all restaurants should keep juice boxes stashed away for kids. The portion's right, it doesn't have caffeine, most kids learn pretty young how to handle them, spilling is MUCH less of an issue, and you don't have the "twelve ounces of fresh-squeezed organic orange juice" problem.
Because most of that juice I mentioned at the breakfast out with H. and kids did NOT get consumed. (TOO PULPY. YUCK.)
What do you think?
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