If the kid’s at the table with the parents, then they can grab food. It’s one thing to give a kid an alcoholic beverage saying, “OK, here’s your wine, and here’s junior’s apple juice.” But once you’ve put the stuff on the table in the middle (not given it to any kid in particular) then isn’t it the parents’ job to restrain the kid until they know what’s in the food/beverage?
I prefer the “put the kid out of arm’s reach of the parents” - because other restaurant patrons really love it when your kids are more than an arm’s reach away.
It’s the parents’ job to police what the kids are eating and drinking at the table, not the restaurant. If this were to happen with one of my kids, it would never cross my mind to blame the server for it, and I sure as hell wouldn’t call the cops. I doubt that I’d even think anything about it if it was just one sip. I’d probably laugh, wipe the kid’s face, give her some milk and forget all about it 4 seconds later. It would never even occur to me to blame anyone but myself. This woman is over the top self-absorbed.
Fuck that bullshit.
Watch your fucking kids. If you don’t want something in their reach, then move it out of their reach.
Okay, share with us your wisdom. How should the restaurant arrange their serviing scheme to prevent the urchins from grabbing food & drink?
I see five possibilities:
- Prohibit anyone under the age of 12 from entering the building.
- Having a separate dining area for children.
- Strapping down the little ones so that their arms & legs are restrained.
- Hiring extra staff so that a single dedicated person is available to watch over each child in the dining room.
- Chop off the children’s fingers immediately upon entry; put the fingers on ice and hire surgeons to reattach later.
Which of these works best for you?
You mean, the scheme of delivering food and drinks to the tables of the people who order them?
I might be able to agree somewhat with Markxxx’s point if the server had specifically set the alcoholic drink down in front of the kid. Even then, of course, the parent should be supervising, but the restaurant should share some of the responsibility. But at most every ‘family friendly’ restaurant I’ve been to, most of the table has been within reach of the kids, and it is the parents’ job to make sure the kids aren’t grabbing something they didn’t. I mean, Christ, this sounds like the kind of woman that, if a staff-member had noticed it first and taken the drink away from the kid, she would sue the restaurant for traumatizing her pwecious mis-spelld (see what I did there?) Snowflake.
We don’t really have the information to know the precise strength of the ale kids drank in the Middle Ages, but I’d hazard a guess that it probably wouldn’t have been all that weak. The ‘dinner ales’, ‘luncheon ales’, and ‘family ales’ of the Victorian era, by which time the invention of the saccharometer allowed for better record-keeping, typically were brewed to gravities of 1035-45, resulting in beers ranging from around 3.5% to nearly 5% ABV. They were definitely weak and watery by the standards of the time, being the weakest beer in the brewer’s range, but normal strength beers by today’s standards. Those Victorians were made of hardier stuff than us today, it seems. The equivalent of a pint of bitter or an American light beer would have been specifically brewed for young children. Our modern culture needs to step it up a bit. Taken in an historical context, we’re alarmingly sober.
And yes, I do have odd hobbies. If anyone would be interested in an ‘Ask the guy who’s oddly obsessed with the history of beer in the British Isles’ thread, let me know.
This looks like the time to recommend this book.
The thing that got me was that all the drinks were put in the center of the table. If you’re serving alcohol at a table with underaged children, I’m pretty sure you need to be, per licensing laws, sure to actually serve the drinks to the adults who have been properly identified as old enough to have that alcohol. That doesn’t eliminate the possibility of a child getting ahold of a drink, but it would certainly lessen the possibility over the practice of dropping drinks in the middle of the table.
Also, it’s not the patrons’ job to sort out what drinks/meals belong to whom, if your servers aren’t capable of remembering who ordered what and actually giving those things to them, and not just to the table, then get new servers.
Go for it!
I can’t see where the GENERAL LAWS OF MASSACHUSETTS, CHAPTER 138. ALCOHOLIC LIQUORS. make any such requirement or distinction. I may have missed something, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I think the restaurant was in perfect compliance with the law.
Yes, ideal table service would mean placing each drink at the correct spot at the table.
The college will be responsible, natch.
I wonder…if they had ordered a bloody mary with tobassco how this would have shaken out? 
Agreed. Even if (as any sane person can tell), the tiny amount of alcohol actually consumed won’t harm the child, the mother clearly thought that it would. So we have this woman who, by her own admission, negligently allowed her child to do something that she thought was deathly dangerous.
Exactly. If it’s the end of the world if your toddler has a sip of alcohol, don’t friggin’ order it!
Then again, if I were aiming to keep something away from the reach of children, the middle of the table would actually seem like the best bet. Assuming the kids aren’t *on *the table or endowed with freakishly long arms.
They stand on the seats. Especially in a booth. A table, mine always at at, a booth seems to involve duct tape to get them to sit. But the booth has its advantages in that I pin them in between me and the wall, so while they stand on the seat, they don’t leave the table, rock their chair…
(I’m so glad they are getting older and the days of toddler behavior are behind us. Now they are just ill mannered and uncivil in the way middle schoolers are.)
It would have been like taking Tobasco from a baby. Everybody would be yelling and screaming.
Ah, thank you kids for this bit of hilarity.