If we’re talking non-fast food joints, then it would be a local steak house in Anchorage when I was probably ten or so. Problem was, ‘eating out’ to me equated to burger and fries, and I insisted that was what I wanted, despite it not being on the menu. My parents even asked the waiter if the chef could make some sort of adjustment. He went to check, but came back with a firm “no”. So the only choice was steak, which I had never had, and “well done” sounded sorta like hamburger, so that’s what I ordered. What I got was a piece of meat that was charred into an inedible cinder (payback from the chef, I’m guessing). So it wasn’t exactly pleasant, but I got what I deserved, which was a lesson that I still remember.
Pretty sure my first time in a sit-down restaurant, as well as the first time using a public bathroom by myself, was in Pizzeria Uno in Chicago. When I returned from the bathroom, I found that somebody piled all the stuff I don’t like on the slice I had left in my plate.
Interesting. I’m sure I was in restaurants from an early age, at least occasionally. If for no other reason, we traveled a bit. Even if just a day trip, it would have required a meal away from home. While I do remember sometimes pulling over and eating what my mother had packed, I’m also sure we ate at restaurants, although I have no specific memories. Fast food, however, was never an option. I never saw my parents eat at a McDonalds or anything similar. (exception, Arby’s. But I was older by then)
Well, the only place I’d consider a fast food joint in Anchorage at that time was the lone A&W Drive-in. The other burger places, of which there were only a few, were privately owned and actually served good food. McDonalds and others didn’t show up until I was out of high school by at least a couple of years.
I don’t remember the actual first time, but I do remember that when we were traveling, we would eat at Howard Johnson’s, which I thought was really special. Late 50s / early 60s ?
I don’t know which was my first restaurant experience, but some of the earliest would have been the Welcome House, which was a coffee shop on Venice very near my Catholic elementary school. It’s now a Versailles (Cuban restaurant), and the first time I went there after the change it was weird as heck. The lady who owned it with her husband was named Tillie Gordon, and she reminded me a lot of Marjorie Maine.
Speaking of a toy chest, there was another coffee shop that I remember from being really little called Tommy Nye’s that had the same kind of pirate chest with cheap toys for kids. It was owned by a guy whose daughter was in my class at school, and it was my first experience of someone “editing” their name. It was Nyerges, so I can see why he shortened it for the restaurant.
Another early memory was a place called Palms Fried Shrimp, but was essentially a Japanese teppanyaki place. I had the most delicious shrimp I’ve ever had. I still have strong memories of that taste. The restaurant didn’t last which made me very sad. I think it’d be a HUGE hit today.
Also, one day I was doing errands with my dad. I was about four, and we went into a bar. I have no idea why I was allowed in, but maybe because my dad worked for the P.O. down the street? He knew the owners well? Anyway, I got a Shirley Temple, and it had an ice cube with a cherry frozen right in it. So cool.
I don’t remember it as a distinct event, but I do recall eating at the Monterey House Tex-Mex restaurants on occasion as a very small child in the mid 1970s, and getting the child’s plate (tamale with chili, rice, beans, and a little praline-type candy at the end). This would have been at roughly the 6000 block of Bissonnet in Houston (near Bayland Park), as that was the nearest outpost of civilization when I was a very little kid- we lived out in Alief past what is now the Beltway back then
The first I remember I was about four. I don’t remember if it was Lombardino’s (https://www.lombardinos.com), Al Johnson’s (https://aljohnsons.com/) or a long-gone restaurant called The Troll Garden.
I don’t remember it, but it was almost certainly at a Gino’s. It was a fast food place with hamburgers much closer to our house than McDonald’s.
Given the average age of a Doper, asking them if they remember their first restaurant is a tall order! The earliest place I can remember eating is McDonald’s in the late 1970s. This was before the introduction of Chicken McNuggets, and as a picky child, I wouldn’t eat hamburgers. The Filet 'o Fish was my sandwich of choice but I don’t remember what was in the Happy Meal. In 1981 McDonald’s introduced the Chicken McNugget and I didn’t look back. Until we moved to Germany in 1982 and there were no Chicken McNuggets until 1983. Dark days indeed.
Everybody goes to Gino’s, 'cause Gino’s is the place to go! There was a Gino’s about a mile from where I lived but I don’t recall ever going there.
I didn’t mention in the OP, but my first restaurant experience would have been in the 60s - probably mid-to-late-60s. These days, it’s more like 60 times a month! 
Well, not quite, but we do eat out a lot.
I don’t remember it because I was still an infant but my mother often told of her taking me out to dinner with Dad and her and how well behaved I was. Followed by an observation about Time Changing All Things. The restaurant in question just closed a couple of years ago. Great hole-in-the-wall Italian place in the wrong part of town.
The first one I remember was a Chinese restaurant not far from my house, which served Cantonese style food. This was in the '50s, long before McDonalds and such made it to New York.
My kids first was a Sunday brunch at Scanticon, a hotel on Route 1 in Princeton. We always went with my wife’s parent and aunt, who took my daughter out to the lobby if needed. Great place since we could get food for her at the buffet right away.
I was four and we were on a train from L.A. to NY. The waiter placed a finger bowl on our table.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_bowl
I promptly picked it up to drink from it.
On second thought, I don’t know if a train’s dining car
qualifies as a restaurant.
When I was about 5 we went to the only Chinese restaurant in town. I had no idea why, and my mother kept trying to get me to try food that all looked, smelled, and tasted awful to me. I’m pretty sure I ate at a diner or lunch counter before then but I can’t say when. It was a couple years later that McDonald’s showed up in the area, we went there with a coupon and ate in the car.
The first time I remember being in a restaurant was probably when my parents took the family to Taiwan when I was almost 6, and we went to several different restaurants while I was there. I remember falling asleep on a cushion near the entrance of one (I was severely jet lagged), asking just for plain rice at another (I wanted something chinese but my stomach wasn’t feeling good), and eating shark fin dumpling at a third which I thought at the time was the coolest thing (we weren’t environmentally conscious back then.) But I’m sure that there were other restaurants I went to before that trip.
A restaurant of any sort – likely either a Burger King, or a Dog ‘n’ Suds drive-in, when I was 3 or 4.
A sit-down restaurant? If the buffet-style Ponderosa steakhouse counted, then we started going there when I was 6 or 7. Otherwise, the first one I remember that actually had a waiter was a nice restaurant we went to after my first communion, when I was 8.
Sometime around Kindergarten, we used to go to a place with car hop service. For some reason, we finally went in and sat at a table and I remember that seeming weird.
The first time I can remember going out with the whole family it was to a long-gone restaurant chain called Beefsteak Charlie’s. Other than that my father would occasionally take me and my sister to a McDonald’s nearby and when we went to Florida when I was 5 to see family we went to Waffle House and South of the Border in addition to the places we went when we were visiting the Mouse.
For the most part, though, my parents were not wealthy so we stayed home almost all the time, even more so when they broke up and my mother had three kids to take care of. My mother ultimately made herself a very comfortable living and had lots put away for the retirement she never got to have, so she and my stepfather went out a lot more later in life, but as a kid even going to get fast food was a luxury reserved for holidays and birthdays, and most times not even then.
I was maybe five or six when my family, along with my grandmother, went to an IHOP, and I got my very own Happy Face pancake. The eyes were cherries, the smile was half a pineapple ring, and the nose was a scoop of vanilla ice cream! Or so I thought until I gobbled it up as my first bite of this magnificent treat.
I do still like butter (and vanilla ice cream), though.