Food & Drink A Plea: Stay out of Restaurants Before 6pm If You Don't Have Kids

Jason Hoffman/Thrillist

We know this isn’t ideal. And we see you there, looking, judging, as our child loudly asks us if she can have 16 jellybeans and watch Tangled before she eats her dinner. I know why we’re here -- because my wife and I would like nothing more than a little taste of the freedom and avocado crostini we once enjoyed, or at the very least someone else to make the food and alcohol for us and clean up the inevitable detritus our child monsters will leave behind, so we can all be fed and done and dramatically overtip in an hour, and on our way towards the glory that is Child Bedtime. This is why we got here at 5:15pm and immediately put in both our cocktail and food orders with the confused host. But let me ask you a question: Why are you here at 5:15pm? What made you come to this restaurant before 6pm unencumbered by the glory and pain of your bloodline? You know what I would do at 5:15pm if I wasn’t with my children?!? I would walk down by the ocean and contemplate the vastness of our miraculous, maddening world. I would go to the gym and wail on my deltoids, because deltoids are the muscle group most commonly neglected when you inevitably quit a gym after having children. I would go to a lake with a book and then pretend to read the book while watching Ozark on my phone. But you know what I wouldn’t do? GO TO A FUCKING RESTAURANT.

There is a certain level of human need as a parent to leave the nest.

I want to be clear about something. I’m not referring to every restaurant. I’m not trying to take my two kids under four to some sort of painfully hip place in the heart of the city during happy hour. Or really any new place in general. I’m basically referring to the lowercase cool approximations of hip restaurants that exist in the suburbs and outer neighborhoods of our cities, the ones that have some of the trappings of the places we remembered fondly from the city (a mezcal cocktail, some sort of ceviche appetizer, MUSTARD GREENS) but also have the wherewithal to offer our children a G-rated menu of comfort foods plus a club soda & grenadine. These faux-hip joints allow us to briefly transport ourselves back to a time before children when our biggest worry for a weekend day was whether to start binge watching Terriers before or after second brunch. We’re not asking you (and for these purposes I’m defining “you” as anyone between the ages of 21 and 40 without kids, or older folks 58-70 who have kids in college and somehow forgot how children work) to stop going to these restaurants altogether. Independent restaurants need folks of reasonable means to support them (plus I would never want to keep you from a place with locally sourced mustard greens). All I’m asking is you give up the time slot between 5pm and, say, 6:30pm. You don’t need to be in the restaurant this early. The only people who should be in the restaurant at this time are families and old people with limited hearing who have a mandate to be back at their homes before Bones reruns start.

I’m not completely without empathy. I remember what it was like to be childless and see children at a table next to me snorting ketchup while licking the bottoms of their shoes and watching weird Australian cartoons on their parents phones. And I remember judging as hard as humanly possible. These were bad parents, I’d think. Why don’t they get babysitters, I’d ask my date. Kids have entirely too much screen time, I’d say knowingly, quoting from some New York Times piece I hadn’t read, but saw mentioned by a journalist on social media. But now, of course, the pendulum has swung in the other direction, and it has swung hard. There is a certain level of human need as a parent to leave the nest, to get out of the house, to do something, anything, that makes you feel even a little bit like someone whose existence is not based around the unpredictable whims of toddlers. And babysitters, while amazing and necessary and vital, are also expensive, hard to pin down and pretty much guaranteed to be going through all of your passwords in a good-natured attempt to blackmail you later on, so you have to pick and choose your babysitter-sponsored reprieves. At this point, we are lucky to have two a month. So naturally, there is a stir crazy element that often rears its head around 4:30pm on a Sunday when my wife might posit the question, “Should… we try and go to dinner?” The word “try” is always included. Because going to dinner with children is not just a thing you decide you will complete. You are attempting it. It might not actually work. You might have to leave when they shit themselves or throw a baseball manager-style tantrum, or after you find out the restaurant is out of mustard greens. But there is always a chance that it will work. There is an irrational optimistic lottery element, a certain type of magical thinking that takes over each dinner experience where I believe that just maybe if I time everything correctly and put orders in early and run my son around and give my daughter enough coloring books and drink gin quickly and then get some hip ceviche and wood-fired pizza and avocado mashed onto some of those greens, it will be OK, or even a positive experience, and we will drive home listening to the edgy rap version of the song the Rock sings off the Moana soundtrack and I might turn to my wife and say, “You know, that actually went OK.” OK is the goal. Hell, OK is the gold.

Going to dinner with children is not just a thing you decide you will complete.

But here’s the thing: In order to achieve those brief moments inside Parental Valhalla, we must be allowed to fail. And in order to have that safety net, we need to be around people with like-minded missions, who will just shake their heads knowingly when it all crumbles and we’re forced to hit eject. And we can’t do it while you’re there shadow murmuring and staring, or turning around in your chair to glare, or sighing audibly several times and getting on Twitter to indulge in the shared experience of public annoyance commiserations. Few things in the social sphere are more infuriating than the American pastime of passive public restaurant shaming, especially if it occurs around 5:45pm. But even just being agreeable and somewhat sympathetic isn’t quite enough here, because part of my stress in these situations is the stress of remembering how annoyed I was when I was you. So I just want to remind you, good sir/madam, you have options. You can wait. Or you can even get annoyed with me openly if I’m cluttering up your hang post-6:30pm. But if, after all of these warnings, you still decide to go early during prime kid dinner time, then you are entering into a social contract with us. And you wouldn’t want to break that and make Jean-Jacques Rousseau feel like he died in vain, right? You wouldn’t do that to JJR, would you? WHY AREN’T YOU SAYING ANYTHING? So maybe next time when 5:30pm rolls around and you’ve finished all seasons of Terriers, and you’re hankering for some food, think about your past and future life and what you want to get out of it, and then, please, for the love of all that is good in this world, just spend an hour before dinner at a bar. We promise not to eat all the mustard greens.