"culinary kids" news and stories

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.

You can buy a pair of chopsticks to help your kids master the fine art of eating without a fork, but why buy when you can make use of the wooden chopsticks you get for free when you order take-out? By using only the paper sleeve that they come in and a small rubberband, you can secure the chopsticks so that they are easy for a child to use - even if they are young enough that their motor stills are less than perfect. One benefit to teaching your kids to use chopsticks early is that they'll think they are a lot of fun and, since they'll be looking for chances to practice their newly honed skills, you can get them to eat a lot more veggies with your Chinese take-out food (since they're easy to pick up) than they ordinarily would!

To watch a video of the construction process, click here.

[Thanks, Jake]

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