Restaurant meals

• We take them everywhere, and always have. Most extreme example was probably a 3.5-hour seven-course lunch in a small Tuscan town that cost over $100/head. But that was for our fifth anniversary, and we couldn't imagine the kids (3 and .5 at the time) not being there.
• We don't take them to family restaurants. These not only have lousy food, but are full of kids acting as negative examples.
• We take them to good places. Places with pretentions often can't deal with kids. The best places, in North America and in Europe, are gracious and accomodating. "Best" doesn't have to mean expensive. It means places that are in the business of serving good food, not places where the point is to be seen or to be offered a dining "experience".
• We don't take them to bad places. It's not true that good food is wasted on kids. Arju prefers black truffles to white, bittersweet dark chocolate to milk. These are decisions she made on her own. We do advise them when there are reasons to believe they won't like something (they haven't liked something similar, or didn't like the same thing last time).
• We don't ask for special favours from the restaurant. We bring our own boosters/highchairs, and things to amuse the kids. They eat from the regular menu, no attempts to convince the chef to make them macaroni and cheese. A few times when driving across the country we let them choose off the kids menu for the novelty and small portion size. After a while they started rejecting them, rightly concluding that the more interesting food was on the "adult" menus.
• We don't let them disturb other patrons. We bring a special set of small, innocuous toys that they only see at restaurants; paper and drawing tools; books. If they get loud or start wandering, we haul them outside and talk to them about their behaviour. We're especially careful to keep them out of the way of servers.
• We don't let them make a mess. If they drop stuff, we pick it up, and we don't leave it for the servers.
• We pay attention to them. This is the single most important factor in ensuring that everyone has a good time. Neglecting kids at a meal is just as bad as neglecting adults, and with potentially more disruptive consequences.