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| A modern kids' menu. Photo: Ed Kohler, Flickr. |
Hanna Raskin's first waitressing job was at a small Greek diner in Michigan. In the 15 years since, she's worked at a chop suey joint in Mississippi, an exclusive Arizonan country club, a vegetarian eatery and an Irish pub. She currently picks up odd shifts at a seafood eatery in the North Carolina mountains, where she cracks crab legs for helpless tourists. This is the sixth in a series of posts.
One of the coolest things about the now-defunct Bill Knapp's restaurant chain was the children's menu, on which every dish bore the name of an animal. Grilled cheese wasn't just a sandwich at Bill Knapp's: It was a giraffe.
But what counted as cute then is apparently considered out-of-touch today, as an increasing number of tykes shun menus designed just for them. To the delight of their beaming foodie parents, restaurants' youngest diners are now eschewing coloring pages and chicken nuggets for crab claws and caviar.
For servers accustomed to sweeping up puddles of Cheerios and apologizing to other customers for the screaming baby seated at one of their tables, the prospect of a junior epicure sounds promising.





I've always been a reader. Now, at the ripe old age of 29, I can hardly remember a time when I didn't have the ability to rip through books at breakneck speed. However, one thing I do recall is the first chapter book I ever read without confusion or parental intervention. It was The Boxcar Children, the story of a family of four children who lose the parents and so go off and live together in an abandoned box car in the woods. My favorite parts of the story were the moments when the children would cook for themselves. I particularly remember them making stew out of beef and baby vegetables and creating a 'refrigerator' out of a bend in a nearby stream in order to keep their milk (in a glass bottle) cool.
While I regularly lose my keys, often misplace my wallet, and have been known to forget my own name, I pride myself on my impressive ability to remember completely random facts. My wife calls me the largest repository of useless knowledge in the Western Hemisphere, and I have to admit that my mind is a steel trap, at least when it comes to completely meaningless trivia.

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