“There is a lot of pressure on parents to keep it civil in these spaces that are increasingly mixed-use between adults and children,” Wood said, and she’d rather avert a meltdown by acquiescing to grilled cheese than distracting her son with an iPad. She worries denying him will cause a scream. Taylor Wood, a 32-year-old freelance writer living in Lincoln Square, has a 4-year-old son who enjoys the lobster bisque from the Mariano’s hot bar and can’t get enough of salmon, which he calls “chicken fish.” But the offerings on kids’ menus, even at neighborhood restaurants with otherwise high-quality food, have created a cycle where he wants grilled cheese and fries every time they go out to eat. Parents don’t want to spend money on food kids rarely finish, and those meals tend to be low cost. Of course, restaurants offer fatty kids’ dishes for a reason. Kids are more open-minded than many restaurants give them credit for, said Nazem, whose daughters for the most part have learned to eat what she and her husband eat.įour-year-old Lila Nazemgoff reaches for edamame as part of her dinner of chicken katsu over rice and plain ramen noodles at Urban Belly in January. Asked what her favorite kind of food is, 4-year-old Lila Nazemgoff, who was using practice chopsticks on the edamame, proclaimed: “Sushi!” She is loyal to the restaurants that do kids’ menus differently, like Urban Belly in the Wicker Park neighborhood, where on a recent visit her children were munching on edamame, dumplings, chicken and rice and ramen soup. She wants to expand her daughters’ culinary horizons but instead encounters beige fish sticks that likely came out of a box.

Nazem, who eats out with her family two or three times a week, finds the kids’ menus at most restaurants frustrating not only because they’re unhealthy but also because they’re limiting.

“That is a result of billions of dollars worth of marketing that has made it the idea of what kid food is.” ‘We did not dumb down flavors’ “Kids are not born with an innate desire for chicken nuggets, french fries and a soda,” said Margo Wootan, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy nonprofit in Washington, D.C.

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