The Secret Restaurateur: Why are families with children given limitless latitude in restaurants?

The summer is in full swing, and the restaurant sector is buzzing as we get to make hay while the sun shines. When things are going well, I tend to focus on the issues that wouldn’t cross my mind for the rest of the year - what the young people might call first world problems.

This year, it’s the issue of children in restaurants, a divisive topic if ever there was one. With the schools closed, there are inevitably more children in restaurants and cafes, on weekdays as well as weekends. This creates added burdens for staff, as children can be tough to serve and clean up after.

They add to noise levels, which in the past meant shouting and screaming, but since Covid increasingly means phones or iPads blaring Baby Shark as if they’re at home on the couch.

One of my restaurants has a very confined floor area, and yet one family used to regularly bring two large buggies with them to brunch at weekends, in the full knowledge that a major table reorganisation was necessary on every occasion.

More than once I sensed annoyance from neighbouring tables. Should other paying customers have to put up with this? Or is it just childless curmudgeons who care about these things?

Lodging a protest with the parents of young children can be a dangerous minefield. Fellow fans of Sex and the City will recall a famous scene where Samantha makes a work call during a meal and is interrupted by a waiter who asks her to put her phone away.

When she points out that a child at the next table is causing far more noise than her, the waiter responds with a shrug. Samantha intervenes with the child’s mother, suggesting that she bring him “somewhere more appropriate for a Happy Meal, so that I can have a happier one”.

For her troubles, she gets pesto splattered over her white business suit, as the child’s mother openly chortles at her spoilt son’s actions.

Sadly, we need to have the honesty to admit that this is how most restaurants deal with children. Minor infractions of the social order by adults dining together or alone are met with swift but polite intervention.

Families with children, however, are given virtually limitless latitude in terms of noise levels and behaviour, while anyone who intervenes risks ritual humiliation.

While it’s easy to blame children, they are after all just children. The real fault lies with parents. My friend the Lawyer was eating breakfast in an upscale cafe and restaurant recently, next to a family with a child who had clearly come directly from the rugby pitch, still in his kit and completely caked in mud.

His father told him “you’d better go wash your hands before you eat”. Bemused, the Lawyer turned to the gentleman and commented wryly: “that’s not all he needs to wash!” In return, he got a death stare that would have turned milk sour.

The message was clear: I and my child will do whatever we like, and to hell with what you think.

“What kind of person thinks it’s okay to bring a child straight from the rugby pitch into a cafe?”, the Lawyer asked me. “Parents seem to think they’re in a bubble when they’re with their kids in public, and that nobody can see or hear them.”

So is there anything to be said for child-free restaurants? Is it a business risk worth taking, to reduce stress on our staff and to preserve the sanity of our childless customers?

If you Google “child-free restaurants” in Ireland, amusingly all you get is a list of links to “child-friendly restaurants”. The Old Barracks Roastery in Birdhill in Co Tipperary is the only child-free cafe or restaurant which I am aware of in the entire country.

In 2019 the former owners of the White Moose Cafe in Phibsborough, Dublin, suggested a 15 per cent surcharge on all bills for screaming children. Most people didn’t get the joke, and their social media was besieged with outraged complaints. Perhaps that has acted as a cautionary tale for the wider sector.

I, for one, will be taking some small steps towards improving matters. With tables and space at a premium this summer, I think I can afford to set some very strict ground rules about noise, behaviour and disruption to other customers.

At the end of the day, children and childless restaurateurs have to peacefully co-exist on this planet. But at the same time, we have to do what’s best to ensure an enjoyable experience for our other customers as well.