You know restaurants have the right to serve what they want. If I want sushi I don't go to an italian place. If he doesn't want to do a kids menu, great! I think kids menus basically show kids that food is "scary". Chicken fingers? Plain pasta? Stay at home then. Our kids love all foods including vegetables because we never added "qualifiers" to their description. I know neighbor children who will eat everything when with us, but notice their parents are quick to say: "oh he won't try that"...ftr, they love fried calamari and zuchini. Go figure.

People act like it's sooooo easy to just "make your kid try something new!" or "leave the kids at home!" Life does not work that way. What are you supposed to do, force escargot into a kid's mouth? Come on. Have some damn compassion. Some kids will be adventurous eaters and some won't. Some adults are douchebags at restaurants and some aren't. Part of being outside of the house and among humanity is that not everything Goes Your Way all the time.

(I don't have kids)

Actually, the rule in my home was, "you must try it once, and if you don't like it you don't have to eat it." Really. This is not unreasonable. Strangely enough, I ended up loving all the foods that kids supposedly "hate."

As far as restaurants, most offer some kind of appetizer (or combination) that satisfies the price and portion requirements.

as a mom of 2 preschoolers... I agree with shovel.

don't get me wrong, 90% of the time we go out to eat, it's to a family friendly place or a place with family portions so we can share. There are times we go out and there is no kid menu. I usually share my dish with my kids... order an extra side that I know they'll love. But you have to expose them to new things. I have one who is on the picky side. my 4 y/o will try anything. She loves Indian food and spicy foods. I just make sure there is something more simple for my 2 y/o. And, we don't go during "date hours". Let's face it, no adult out on an adult night wants to sit at a table next to unpredictable tots. I get that. I remember. We date on occasion.

It's not a question of getting kids to try new things. The issue is paying $15 for new things and then having to buy something else when your kid spits it on the floor.

If your kid would spit food on the floor you shouldn't be taking them anywhere that has $15 items on the menu.

If your kids aren't old enough to eat with the adults hire a fucking babysitter or go to McDonald's.

Portions too big? They have this thing now called a "to-go container". You can ask for the unfinished food to be put in one for your later convenience.

It's the owner/chef's place to determine what goes on the menu, not some dumb-ass entitled parent.

All this does is teaches kids to throw a fit when they don't get what they want- another generation of spoiled whiners.

you can make really interesting food that will appeal to typical kids. the real problem is that parents think they should be able to go wherever they want and get whatever they want. (not all parents, these parents). seriously, if a restaurant doesn't have something your kids will eat, don't eat there.

and why can't restaurants just sell a half portion of the same food? i mean, in a diner, the kids menu is just the same stuff in a smaller portion, maybe with a funny name. the only reason kids menus are associated with greasy plain fare is because that is the food served in restaurants with kids menus. just make a kids menu with an order of 3 escargot or a small portion of whatever it is you normally sell.

the trying new things thing is bs though. you don't want to pay the kind of money we're talking about to have your kid eat a piece and hate it. trying new things is what you do at home, when you have time and a place for leftovers.

Heh, that happened when my sister brought her kids to the Patsy's on the UWS. She asked for butter on her daughter's pasta, and they told her "Sorry, we don't have any butter in the building."

Here's a trick to getting them to eat something other than chicken nuggets: make it a challenge, a little reverse psychology. Before you even offer them the food, say "Oh, I don't think you can handle this food. This is big person food."

Restaurateurs design their menus in all respects based on what type of clientele they want to attract and what sort of joint they want to run. If they don't have a kids' menu, they probably aren't overly anxious to attract the sort of customer who requires a kids' menu to be part of their dining experience. They probably have other customers they would prefer having in their establishment for whom the existence of a kids' menu would be a turn-off, either in and of itself or in terms of what other type of customer it would attract. Pretty simple.

I'd like to go to a restaurant once where there aren't kids mixing sugar packets in water, dumping salt on the table or throwing a tantrum and kicking my chair. Leave them home.

Yep, I hear ya, Nello does get crazy on Friday nights. Please.

If their offspring can't bring themselves to try something new, then perhaps the parents have made the wrong restaurant choice. There are many alternatives that will cater to the chicken nugget and meatball brigades. Besides, fewer distraught children wrestling over foods they won't eat makes for fewer disturbed diners (I am a parent btw).

Of course if children are not introduced to a wide variety of foods early on, then God help the parents when they try later!

What nonsense. Pass the Grey Poupon. We'll make sure to take a distant table at Cipriani next time. Oh, and you're the first parent I've heard of who uses the term "offspring" to refer to children - was "issue" already taken? Let me guess, yours eat squid, too? And if your cockamamie agro-Darwinian theories held any water (see para. 2), spinach would have long ago ceased to exist.

Kids' Menus can often be an unintended source of urban hilarity. The Citicorp Houston's/Hillstone, despite the chain's southern origins, has no Kids' Menu. (Plenty of Stepford smiles, but no Kids' menu.) That's fine. So we ask for a plain dish of pasta, any shape, with butter and grated cheese. The server looks confused, but these are larder staples, right? More smiles. What comes is virtually unprecedented in my experience: a literal finger bowl of approximately 10 spaghetti strands slicked with butter, the grated cheese temporarily forgotten. Even for a 4-year-old, this is a quarter portion at best. So we say, "Oh no, needs be bigger." A second one...like, the exact same thing...appears. By the end of it, we just told the boy that we wouldn't order a third and if he wanted he could have a bite of my French Dip or maybe a brussel sprout. Laughter ensued.

My son loves grilled squid. Especially since we told him it was a giant squid and showed him a picture of one. He can't get enough- which is good for us since we like it too. It's all in the presentation folks.

I've been promising him dinosaur eggs for months but Gristede's never seems to have them in stock.

C'mon already. Saying it's all in the presentation is just giving yourselves a big ol' back pat, no? It'll work for a bit, like the time we went to the Riverhead Aquarium and, his mind still full of rays and what not, he copped half my soft shell crab sandwich at Modern Snack Bar (Aquebogue - you should go) right afterwards. So what, since then my "presentation" to him of soft-shell crab has completely collapsed? That day, he loved it. That day.

"wean" = accustom to the absence of a habit or food.

"ween" = push th' little daisies and make them come up.

I love the idea of treating kids like humans.

You don't have any, do you.

1. Order and quickly down strong drink (this is key)

2. Order something familiar enough for the kids to fill up on to avoid repeating dinnertime again later after bathtime.

3. Wolf down your entree before they finish coloring the menu and melt down.

4. Contemplate vasectomy.

5. Next time just go out for fucking pizza.