When restaurants take children off the menu

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This article was published 08/04/2017 (3135 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE final straw was a little girl using an iPad with the volume on high, a device her parents refused to turn down despite repeated requests from the staff at Caruso’s, an upscale Italian restaurant in Mooresville, N.C.

Manager Yoshi Nunez had encountered unruly kids in his restaurant before, but this time, the parents were misbehaving, too.

“Finally, we had to ask them to leave,” Nunez told The Washington Post. “They were upset, but they didn’t seem to care about what the other guests thought. We tried to be nice about the situation, but we’re here to take care of customers and we can’t tell a parent how to control their kids.

“That was the incident that triggered the entire thing.”

“The entire thing,” as Nunez puts it, is the restaurant’s strict ban on children under the age of five. It went into effect in January, drawing passionate applause from some diners online and angry condemnation from others.

Nunez said the ban — conceived by the restaurant’s owner, Pasquale Caruso — has led to a dramatic increase in reservations, noting Caruso’s has seen a spike in diners, from about 50 per day to around 80.

“Banning children has always been a topic in the industry and every owner says, ‘I wish I could do it.’ Our owner has the full support of the staff.”

It’s hard to say whether child bans are officially a restaurant industry trend, but they’re no longer unusual.

Caruso’s — which describes itself as “traditional, classy, intimate” on its website — is the latest in a series of eateries to ban children or introduce measures to control them.

In recent years, restaurants in Korea, Italy, Australia, Texas, Pennsylvania and California have either banned young children outright or introduced rules for their behaviour, according to online dining guide Eater.

As The Washington Post’s Amy Joyce wrote in 2013, the trend has even hit a Virginia neighbourhood “known for stroller traffic jams.”

The northern Virginia neighbourhood, she wrote, “is experiencing a different kind of mommy war” with the arrival of a Japanese restaurant “for people 18 and older. Only. No kids. No strollers. Just adults enjoying sushi and sake in a lounge-type setting.”

In Houston, Cuchara, an intimate Mexican restaurant full of delicate artwork, in 2015 began handing out cards with behavioural instructions to customers with children, according to CBS affiliate KHOU. The etiquette training was introduced after a child scratched the restaurant walls with a quarter, causing US$1,500 in damage.

“How do we stop that kind of thing?” owner Ana Beaven told the station. “We’re busy serving and cleaning… and we cannot babysit a child.”

Do the etiquette cards annoy parents? “It doesn’t offend anyone, it’s a set of rules,” Beaven added.

The debate surrounding the bans invokes larger questions about sociology, class and parenting trends, with some researchers saying they are the natural result of a culture of overtaxed parents desperate to spend as much time as possible with their children, even if that one-on-one time occurs over a fine bottle of wine at the expense of other diners around them.

Liam Flynn, owner of Australia’s Flynn’s Restaurant, which bans children under age seven, has a simpler explanation that speaks to how casual dining has become for many families.

“A lot of parents think they’re paying for the space and service and taking a break, and therefore taking a break from parenting, as well,” he told Eater. “There’s a lot of people who feel they are not accountable for their own or their child’s actions.”

Sarah Dolan, director of media relations for the National Restaurant Association, says her group isn’t ready to call it a trend.

“Every restaurant is different, and it’s up to each operator to make decisions that are best for their business and their guests,” she says. “There are more than one million restaurants in the United States and the majority of them welcome families with children.”

— The Washington Post