Salad for children?!

I mentioned a trip to Milton Keynes, but wanted to share my thoughts (read, incredulity!) at the children’s menu where we stopped for food.

I decided that Jamie’s Italian might be nice to try as I’d eaten at one before and enjoyed the food, so fancied trying it again.  N’s pretty easy to feed as he’ll eat anything although the hardest bit is working out whether buying a children’s meal is worth it when they cater for up to 12 years old-ish, or if it’s better to share my meal (mmm, would rather have it all to myself, especially as N can eat quite a lot of it).

Their customer service was great – one allocated waitress, they explained all the specials, gave N some crayons (which he proceeded to try and break, then eat, then tip over the floor), provided a Stokke high chair which was the perfect height for the tables, and offered children’s cutlery.  Plus the kids menu was fun – you got to look through a viewmaster to see what was available.

Mmm, I like this pepper pot

I decided the best thing for N would be the fish fingers (although why there was no pasta on the kids menu I have no idea!), but it came with salad.  Salad?!  For a child.  How many kids eat salad?  And it was leafy salad, not chunks of cucumber, tomato, avocado.  Well, N won’t eat lettucy stuff, it just gets stuck to the roof of his mouth and he struggles with it, so I asked if we could swap it for some kind of veg.

The waitress went off to check…err, just peas would have been fine, please tell me a restaurant stocks some simple type of veg.

Nope.

Everything here’s salad, rather than veg, but the chef can do you some swiss chard.

Hmm, ok.  Well, it was lovely, but N’s not really a fan of cabbage veg either.  Something about the leaves and stalks makes it hard for him to eat.  So that was fish fingers (2 out of the 3 provided), and some of my ravioli.  Not particularly healthy lunch for him.

I just can’t believe that a good restaurant which supposedly is very child friendly provides salad as the ‘veg’ portion on all children’s dishes on the menu.  Even McDonalds can provide veg sticks.  Will have to do better research when deciding where to take him in future, until he starts eating lettuce anyway.

Anyone got any tips for restaurants which offer appropriate sized toddler meals with normal food, and normal vegetable options.

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2 Comments

  1. That’s a shame, I’d heard that Jamie’s Italian was really good for children. The place we tend to go with little ones is Pizza Hut. I’m not especially keen on the food compared to other places but they usually seem to do a free kid’s meal with an adult meal. So they get a trip to the salad bar which has lots of kid friendly food like carrot sticks, cucumber, grapes, raisins, breadsticks and so on, then they get a main meal which is quite simple, and a drink. We take my son’s own cup with water to drink so I have his drink, and then we usually end up sharing his pizza as he doesn’t eat it all. The best thing is that you can go to the salad bar as soon as you’ve ordered, so you’re not sitting around waiting for food. Also it can be quite noisy so it doesn’t matter if they make a racket!

    If we eat out anywhere a bit nicer (by this I mean perhaps Pizza Express, we’re not that fancy!) then we don’t tend to order a child’s menu even for my three year old, we just all share what we’re eating as he eats so little that it’s not worth it!

    1. We sometimes do Pizza Hut with 2 other families as the kids menus are great for their older children. And Pizza Express is great, although I find that generally it’s easiest for me to have a pizza as then N will have some of that, but there’ll still be enough left for me.

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