It was the breaded turkey dinosaurs that finally did it. They were served to my two-year-old son Eddie by the cafe at a children’s farm in the Cotswolds and they were, in every way, disgusting: they had the texture of cardboard-covered sawdust, just less of the flavour. The only similarity they had to food was that, if eaten, they wouldn’t kill you, at least not immediately. Here we were, at a visitor attraction famed for its child friendliness.
Man, this all sounds so familiar. “Child-friendly” is so predictably a euphemism for “shit.” I’m wouldn’t necessarily go to the extent of heading for the most adventurous restaurant I can find by way of avoiding the problem, but I’ve certainly found that Ada is pretty consistently more willing to give non-stereotypically unchallenging food a go than one might be led to believe by “child-friendly” menus. Blue cheese, parmesan, dark chocolate, porter beer? Yum, yum!
(I hasten to add that the porter, unlike the others on that list, is not an especially common treat.)
There are actually heaps of restaurants (and, for that matter, cafes) in Wellington that are kid friendly and not shit. You have to avoid the stereotypically Anglo-Saxon establishments that seem to have picked up a snotty Victorian English “seen and not heard” view of the world, but Le Metropolitan on Cuba Street, Scopa, the Victoria Street Cafe, Manon in Newtown have all been excellent places to take Ada and have contributed greatly to her ability to eat out in a civilised fashion.
