My son is four and does not sit still, which I have stopped apologising for and started planning around. So when my sister-in-law suggested breakfast out on a Saturday with both our families, I said yes and quietly assumed I would be eating standing up.
We got there at 8:40 and there was already a line down the sidewalk. I nearly turned around in the parking lot.
What happened instead is that a woman came down the line with a clipboard, saw the two strollers, and said they had a table in the back room that seats eight and nobody had claimed it, did we want it. It was maybe fifteen minutes total. She also asked, before seating us, whether we wanted to be near the window or away from it — which sounds like nothing until you have a kid who cannot stop looking at a parking lot.
The part I keep thinking about
Halfway through, my son knocked over a full glass of orange juice. Not a small spill. It went across the table, onto my sister-in-law, and onto the floor.
The server was there in about ten seconds with a towel and said, cheerfully and without any edge to it, that it happens roughly nine times a morning. She brought him a new juice without being asked and did not put it on the bill. Nobody made a face. Nobody sighed.
I have been in restaurants where that same spill turned into twenty minutes of me feeling like a nuisance. The difference is entirely in how the staff decide to react, and it is the whole reason I wanted to write this.
Practical bits
Go before nine or after eleven. The back room is the one to ask for if you have strollers — the front is tight. There is a changing table in the women’s restroom; I did not check the men’s, and I wish I had. Kids’ pancakes are four dollars and enormous.
Street parking only, and it fills by nine.