![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Ordering off the Kids Menu
Sep. 12th, 2023 06:20 pmWell, the world is mostly back to normal, because news coverage that goes mildly viral now includes things like gross airplanes seats and airlines treating paying customers badly, and people who advocate for ordering off the kids menu and the people who shame them for it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2023/09/11/kids-meal-hack-adults/
In this case, there are TikToks about how you can order meals out all the time and stay within budget and get the right portion sizes by ordering from the kids menu. The new part is probably the TikTok part.
““It’s a little tacky,” Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema says. The topic comes up every so often in his weekly reader chats, where diners seek recommendations and counsel for restaurant etiquette quandaries. “Restaurants are businesses and businesses need to make money,” he says. “If someone is trying to spend less or eat less, it’s better to order one or two appetizers.””
This is absolutely a standard of the genre — “if you don’t want as much food, order an appetizer”. And yet, at many restaurants, the appetizers are as large or larger than an entree, and with the exception of “platters” which are usually samples of multiple other appetizers (and really freaking enormous), there isn’t a ton of variety. While a kids meal will usually include protein, carb and some approximation to a fruit or veg, that appetizer is probably going to be something proteinacious with a carby coating and an insane amount of salt and sugar in the sauce.
Absent from this recent entry in the genre are the usual comments about how the quality of the kids menu — look it’s just a burger / pasta / hot dog, don’t you want real food? This likely reflects evolution in the kids menu over time, altho it is possible it instead reflects the shorter, post-pandemic, supply chain constrained menus at a lot of restaurants that are not honestly _that_ much more sophisticated than a kids’ menu.
Let’s have a look at some of the oldies in this genre:
From 2018:
https://thetakeout.com/ask-the-salty-waitress-is-it-okay-for-adults-to-order-1823525004
“You don’t have to take home a doggie bag (though I’m never mad about leftovers, so it pains me to put this in the “pros” column.)”
So, this one is exceptionally weird, because basically all 3 pros are variations on a theme (portions are smaller). I quote this one mostly to hate on it. Especially if I am traveling, I really _don’t_ want to be schlepping leftovers in a car where I cannot refrigerate them (or make sure they don’t spill), on a plane, etc., much less to a hotel room which may or may not have a mini fridge and even if it does, who knows if it will work. And I might well have entirely other plans for my next several meals, so the leftovers are Not Happening. My sister will diligently eat just about any kind of leftover for breakfast when on vacation; I’d much rather figure out a way to order the right amount of food.
The cons are: you look tacky, the food’s not good and I (the waitress) get less of a tip. To which I would respond: Like I Fucking Care, if I’m ordering off the kids’ menu it is because there was something on the kids’ menu that I or someone else wanted to eat (and sometimes there isn’t anything that I or someone else wants to eat off the main menu) and, finally, I order alcohol and tip heavily. If you can produce a non-sorbet dessert that does not involve milk products, I will order that, too.
I’m now going to dissect the rest of the article:
“If I was you, I’d frequent restaurants that serve portions more in line with what I want. [Me: this happens most often when my choices are constrained by travel] Or, if you know you’re going out to dinner, maybe eat a smaller lunch so you can enjoy a full portion at dinner? [Me: and lunch was eaten at a restaurant, too.] Or how about going to a small-plates restaurant and sharing with your friends so that you only have to eat what you want from each dish? [Me: Because I’m traveling with the group I’m traveling with and no one else. And also, dietary constraints for me and other people that if collectively enforced would mean we could have water and maybe some dry bread if you have it.]”
“It’s none of my business to tell you how much to eat, but the kids’ menu really should be reserved for kids under 12. Going out to eat should feel special, so go ahead, order from the real menu and live a little. I can still bring crayons to your table if you want.”
That last paragraph is breathtaking. This is a sentiment that is Of An Era with stories in which restaurant workers were quoted complaining about people with allergies expecting them to be accommodated. You really wonder why anyone with this perspective is _in_ the hospitality industry. I agree, going out to eat should feel special. And except when I am _returning_ to a restaurant I already know and love, I probably have read the menus online for a half dozen to several dozen restaurants before arriving at the restaurant in question. And when I get there, I have determined that there is at least two things for each of my kids that they would probably like to eat, and in consultation with my husband we are pretty sure there is something that he can eat. I make sure there is at least one thing on the menu that I can probably eat — it is difficult to be certain, if the menu does not annotate with allergens. But the backup plan for me is always to order off the kids’ menu, because the kids’ menu is _way_ _more_ _allergy_ _friendly_, partly just because it is simpler, but also because so many kids’ have parents who are willing to speak up and make sure those allergies are accommodated. If you made the whole menu as allergy friendly as the kids’ menu, you’d probably see fewer people ordering off of it. Not a lot fewer, but a little bit.
This reddit thread from 6 years ago covers all the same ground: bariatric surgery or cancer treatment and can’t eat much, orders a small portion because they are drinking their calories, people who have very limited things they want to / are able to eat, things that do not reheat / save well, on their way to a place that makes saving the food for later unworkable, kids’ menus are “loss leaders”, servers who will “let” some adults order off the kids’ menus but not other adults (basically, you have to “look” like the tiny stomach little old lady or that you have developmental delays or whatever and this server thinks it makes sense for them to gatekeep), bosses who get mad if the servers let adults order of the kids menu, the interaction with unlimited refills and kids meals, etc. The entire debate is here in all its glory.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/7riy4o/adults_ordering_off_of_the_kids_menu/
One of the things that becomes abundantly clear after you’ve read your 100th advice column / reddit thread (hopefully sooner!) or your third advice book is that the rules are simpler than reality, and the people who want to enforce the rules are a lot less imaginative than the people who would like to not have to follow the rules.
While Happy Hour pricing is only mentioned in passing here once (that I noticed — I probably didn’t read all the way to the bottom of the thread), Happy Hour nibbles are priced low because the expectation is that you are going to be drinking and they will make money on the alcohol. One of my Seattle cousins at one point had an entire spreadsheet put together of all the restaurants in Seattle that had Happy Hours and which days / hours they were so that they could basically eat out whenever they wanted and have a high quality, inexpensive meal in a somewhat trendy restaurant. I’ve eaten at a fair number of restaurants that had Happy Hour options, and I really do not remember any of them requiring you to actually order much less consume alcohol to order the cheap food items.
Post-pandemic, a lot of cities are still having a much earlier, single-seating dinner clientele. That means it is kinda tough to bring back the Early Bird specials from pre-pandemic. Maybe what we really need are some Late Night Dinner deals. In the meantime, I have no idea where any of this is going to go, but I absolutely am unsympathetic to every restaurant that wants to enforce age limits on the items sold on the kids menu. If you want to change the price based on the age of the diner, you do you. I don’t give a fuck. And that’s what I always tell my server when I’m asking them to change something or do something weird. “I don’t care what you charge me” whether it’s to add a side, remove a side, swap a side or combine parts of different things into something else. And I really don’t. Thus, I am in no position to speak to or for the proposition of doing this to get a deal at a restaurant.
ETA: I suppose I should add, whenever I see this kind of discussion, _especially_ the “etiquette” advice to not order off the kids’ meal because whatever, I just sit and think, you know, maybe I’ll just never go to a restaurant again. I mean, if the people who work at restaurants, and the people who review restaurants, are gonna be _this_ inhospitable, probably I should just have friends over.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2023/09/11/kids-meal-hack-adults/
In this case, there are TikToks about how you can order meals out all the time and stay within budget and get the right portion sizes by ordering from the kids menu. The new part is probably the TikTok part.
““It’s a little tacky,” Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema says. The topic comes up every so often in his weekly reader chats, where diners seek recommendations and counsel for restaurant etiquette quandaries. “Restaurants are businesses and businesses need to make money,” he says. “If someone is trying to spend less or eat less, it’s better to order one or two appetizers.””
This is absolutely a standard of the genre — “if you don’t want as much food, order an appetizer”. And yet, at many restaurants, the appetizers are as large or larger than an entree, and with the exception of “platters” which are usually samples of multiple other appetizers (and really freaking enormous), there isn’t a ton of variety. While a kids meal will usually include protein, carb and some approximation to a fruit or veg, that appetizer is probably going to be something proteinacious with a carby coating and an insane amount of salt and sugar in the sauce.
Absent from this recent entry in the genre are the usual comments about how the quality of the kids menu — look it’s just a burger / pasta / hot dog, don’t you want real food? This likely reflects evolution in the kids menu over time, altho it is possible it instead reflects the shorter, post-pandemic, supply chain constrained menus at a lot of restaurants that are not honestly _that_ much more sophisticated than a kids’ menu.
Let’s have a look at some of the oldies in this genre:
From 2018:
https://thetakeout.com/ask-the-salty-waitress-is-it-okay-for-adults-to-order-1823525004
“You don’t have to take home a doggie bag (though I’m never mad about leftovers, so it pains me to put this in the “pros” column.)”
So, this one is exceptionally weird, because basically all 3 pros are variations on a theme (portions are smaller). I quote this one mostly to hate on it. Especially if I am traveling, I really _don’t_ want to be schlepping leftovers in a car where I cannot refrigerate them (or make sure they don’t spill), on a plane, etc., much less to a hotel room which may or may not have a mini fridge and even if it does, who knows if it will work. And I might well have entirely other plans for my next several meals, so the leftovers are Not Happening. My sister will diligently eat just about any kind of leftover for breakfast when on vacation; I’d much rather figure out a way to order the right amount of food.
The cons are: you look tacky, the food’s not good and I (the waitress) get less of a tip. To which I would respond: Like I Fucking Care, if I’m ordering off the kids’ menu it is because there was something on the kids’ menu that I or someone else wanted to eat (and sometimes there isn’t anything that I or someone else wants to eat off the main menu) and, finally, I order alcohol and tip heavily. If you can produce a non-sorbet dessert that does not involve milk products, I will order that, too.
I’m now going to dissect the rest of the article:
“If I was you, I’d frequent restaurants that serve portions more in line with what I want. [Me: this happens most often when my choices are constrained by travel] Or, if you know you’re going out to dinner, maybe eat a smaller lunch so you can enjoy a full portion at dinner? [Me: and lunch was eaten at a restaurant, too.] Or how about going to a small-plates restaurant and sharing with your friends so that you only have to eat what you want from each dish? [Me: Because I’m traveling with the group I’m traveling with and no one else. And also, dietary constraints for me and other people that if collectively enforced would mean we could have water and maybe some dry bread if you have it.]”
“It’s none of my business to tell you how much to eat, but the kids’ menu really should be reserved for kids under 12. Going out to eat should feel special, so go ahead, order from the real menu and live a little. I can still bring crayons to your table if you want.”
That last paragraph is breathtaking. This is a sentiment that is Of An Era with stories in which restaurant workers were quoted complaining about people with allergies expecting them to be accommodated. You really wonder why anyone with this perspective is _in_ the hospitality industry. I agree, going out to eat should feel special. And except when I am _returning_ to a restaurant I already know and love, I probably have read the menus online for a half dozen to several dozen restaurants before arriving at the restaurant in question. And when I get there, I have determined that there is at least two things for each of my kids that they would probably like to eat, and in consultation with my husband we are pretty sure there is something that he can eat. I make sure there is at least one thing on the menu that I can probably eat — it is difficult to be certain, if the menu does not annotate with allergens. But the backup plan for me is always to order off the kids’ menu, because the kids’ menu is _way_ _more_ _allergy_ _friendly_, partly just because it is simpler, but also because so many kids’ have parents who are willing to speak up and make sure those allergies are accommodated. If you made the whole menu as allergy friendly as the kids’ menu, you’d probably see fewer people ordering off of it. Not a lot fewer, but a little bit.
This reddit thread from 6 years ago covers all the same ground: bariatric surgery or cancer treatment and can’t eat much, orders a small portion because they are drinking their calories, people who have very limited things they want to / are able to eat, things that do not reheat / save well, on their way to a place that makes saving the food for later unworkable, kids’ menus are “loss leaders”, servers who will “let” some adults order off the kids’ menus but not other adults (basically, you have to “look” like the tiny stomach little old lady or that you have developmental delays or whatever and this server thinks it makes sense for them to gatekeep), bosses who get mad if the servers let adults order of the kids menu, the interaction with unlimited refills and kids meals, etc. The entire debate is here in all its glory.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/7riy4o/adults_ordering_off_of_the_kids_menu/
One of the things that becomes abundantly clear after you’ve read your 100th advice column / reddit thread (hopefully sooner!) or your third advice book is that the rules are simpler than reality, and the people who want to enforce the rules are a lot less imaginative than the people who would like to not have to follow the rules.
While Happy Hour pricing is only mentioned in passing here once (that I noticed — I probably didn’t read all the way to the bottom of the thread), Happy Hour nibbles are priced low because the expectation is that you are going to be drinking and they will make money on the alcohol. One of my Seattle cousins at one point had an entire spreadsheet put together of all the restaurants in Seattle that had Happy Hours and which days / hours they were so that they could basically eat out whenever they wanted and have a high quality, inexpensive meal in a somewhat trendy restaurant. I’ve eaten at a fair number of restaurants that had Happy Hour options, and I really do not remember any of them requiring you to actually order much less consume alcohol to order the cheap food items.
Post-pandemic, a lot of cities are still having a much earlier, single-seating dinner clientele. That means it is kinda tough to bring back the Early Bird specials from pre-pandemic. Maybe what we really need are some Late Night Dinner deals. In the meantime, I have no idea where any of this is going to go, but I absolutely am unsympathetic to every restaurant that wants to enforce age limits on the items sold on the kids menu. If you want to change the price based on the age of the diner, you do you. I don’t give a fuck. And that’s what I always tell my server when I’m asking them to change something or do something weird. “I don’t care what you charge me” whether it’s to add a side, remove a side, swap a side or combine parts of different things into something else. And I really don’t. Thus, I am in no position to speak to or for the proposition of doing this to get a deal at a restaurant.
ETA: I suppose I should add, whenever I see this kind of discussion, _especially_ the “etiquette” advice to not order off the kids’ meal because whatever, I just sit and think, you know, maybe I’ll just never go to a restaurant again. I mean, if the people who work at restaurants, and the people who review restaurants, are gonna be _this_ inhospitable, probably I should just have friends over.