From The Washington Post:
All that was left of Julia Washington’s
seared-scallop entree were the baby artichokes. The 10-year-old speared one with
a fork, eyeing it with curiosity and contempt.
“I don’t know about new things. I don’t know how
they taste,” the fifth-grader from Upper Marlboro said at the restaurant Equinox. “It looks like a mushroom. I don’t like mushrooms.”
Julia is a typical child. She loves mac and cheese,
fried shrimp, ice cream. But she couldn’t order from the kids’ menu that night,
because Equinox has no kids’ menu. The restaurant’s chef, Todd Gray, does not
believe in kid food.
“With the right encouragement, kids will eat
anything,” Gray said.
Most restaurants don’t give children many choices:
chicken fingers. Tater tots. Or bland, cheese-laden pizza, accompanied by a cup
of limp fruit salad. And some parents are getting tired of it.
“The idea that there is different food for children
drives me nuts,” said Lynn Fredericks, founder of Family Cook Productions, an organization that teaches healthful family
eating. She recently launched the Kids Food Reboot, a campaign to get
restaurants to adapt their kids’ menus to rely less on frozen french fries and
other beige fried foods and more on healthful, fresh and — most important —
interesting choices for young diners. Given the chance to eat, say, spaghetti
squash or broccoli rabe, children will rise to the occasion, Fredericks says.
“Children will eat other foods. They will,” she
said. “It’s just about how you present it.”
She has enlisted several chefs across the country —
among them such TV personalities as Mary Sue Milliken of “Top Chef Masters” and
Arlington’s David Guas of the Travel Channel’s “American Grilled” — to adapt dishes on their regular menus to
be more suitable in portion size, spice level and nutritional content for kids.
She also asks them to add a “touch of whimsy” in the form of, for example, a
sesame-seed face on a hard-cooked egg or a rainbow of vegetables with
cauliflower clouds: Eating vegetables, she says, should be just as much fun as
eating chicken nuggets. It’s starting out small, but Fredericks and the chefs
involved plan to recruit others to the cause.
“To have a hamburger is not
bad. To have mac and cheese is not bad,” Fredericks said. “The problem,
inherently, is not what each of those things is. It’s perpetuating the
separateness of what kids eat.”
Kids’ menus began
in the era of Prohibition, when restaurants were eager to recoup lost liquor revenue by tapping a
new demographic. The Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York was among the first to
have one, and, like other kids’ menus it inspired, it was laden with healthful
but bland foods. By the 1970s, when processed foods took hold, kids’ menus of
fried chicken and french fries, now ubiquitous, began their ascent — at least
in the United States. In much of the rest of the world, kids eat the same food
as adults.
“Kids are infamous for loving ketchup and pasta and
other foods that they will gravitate towards if you allow them to,” said Guas,
chef -owner of Bayou Bakery in Arlington. “You have to remember to be creative when preparing foods
for kids, or else you’ll lose their interest.”
He knows: Like the other chefs who are helping
launch this campaign, Guas is a parent. Although his two sons might possess
more sophisticated palates than the average child’s, they still have their
likes and dislikes.
For Bayou Bakery’s “little yat’s” menu, he has
adapted his turkey-meatball dish into a smaller portion served atop spaghetti
squash. Other options include turkey sandwiches, a veggie-laden mac and cheese
of the day and, yes, a hot dog.
At the more upscale Equinox, Gray has long offered
half- portions of kid-friendly dishes such as house-made pappardelle pasta or
roast chicken. When dealing with a child diner, servers can rattle off
kid-friendly options — like the grilled polenta over fall ratatouille that he
created for the Kids Food Reboot. But often, Gray will improvise something
based on what the child requests.
“Sometimes it makes us a little crazy, because they
start putting steak on top of noodles. We never say no,” he said. “The pickiest
stuff is that they don’t want stuff ‘touching.’ ” He also tempers the spice level: “You don’t want to blow some child
over with tons of garlic and rosemary. You’ll find that kids don’t want
scallions and mint put on fish. I like to serve everything on the side, just to
be safe.”
Not all children are afraid to
eat their vegetables. Recently, food-oriented Web sites have been inspired by
the idea of children eating like adults and have sent them to fancy restaurants
to capture their viral-video-ready reactions. They don’t always love what
they’re served. The Bold Italic, a San Francisco online magazine, sent a child
to the renowned French Laundry (“It looks really not
good” was a 4-year-old girl’s assessment of caviar), and
the New York Times recently made a video of second-graders reviewing the $220
seven-course tasting menu at Daniel. After they complained about
Daniel’s squash ravioli (“This looks like soap”), chef-restaurateur Daniel
Boulud told the kids, “Next time, we’ll do macaroni and cheese,” and they all
cheered.
