Where ‘kid-friendly’ means good food and fun for littlies
SOME kids are in the cubbyhouse, cooking make-believe pies. Others are digging in the sandpit, right alongside. Still others are indoors, pouring “tea” at a table or pulling a toy tram around a partially soundproofed room.
The Garden at Grounds of Alexandria (Pic : Ground Roasters)
Are we in a playground? Not in the conventional sense. What do you call a playground, smart cafe, parents’ retreat and garden all rolled into one?
In this case, let’s call it Patch. Opened in leafy, leisurely Stirling in the Adelaide Hills early last month, Patch Kitchen & Garden is at the forefront of a minors’ revolution in eating out, one that is rewriting the rules about what defines sophisticated child-friendly dining in Australia.
“We don’t want to be pigeonholed as ‘kid-friendly’,” says young owner Ben Barnett, father to two-year-old Bailey. “We see ourselves as family-friendly, a rather brave concept in the Australian restaurant scene, meaning somewhere that can accommodate not only parents and their kids but also customers who don’t have children.”
To that end, there is plenty of scope at Patch, an inviting, circa-1884 bluestone-sandstone building of multiple rooms and grassed outdoor area plus chook house and veggie patch, to sit at a safe distance from the tiny despots. Even — and here’s the rub — if one of them happens to be yours. Such is the nature of the design here that you can, often, keep an eye on your happily playing child without having to get up from the table. Priceless.
It’s a similar scene at Sydney’s two-year-old the Grounds of Alexandria, a sprawling cafe, organic garden, courtyard and animal nursery that smashes the old maxim about the impossibility of pleasing all of the people all of the time. In fact, such has been the Grounds’ success (try getting a table at peak hours; that is, most of the time) that further expansion, mainly to the kids’ areas, is under way. On completion, the Grounds will include a children’s cinema, more play zones and spaces for weekly free kids’ activities, as well as a free nanny service (please, form an orderly queue) and free dog-washing facility. Meantime, your child is already highly amused, thank you, running excitedly between visiting the famous resident pig Kevin Bacon and Fluffy the beautiful macaw, recently installed at alfresco venue the Potting Shed. All this and fabulous coffee, too.
At another groundbreaking business, the fun and frenetic Coogee Pavilion, it turns out the inspired kids’ play space at the back of this Sydney beachside pub was something of an accident. As Merivale’s Justin Hemmes explains, the original concept was for an adult games and lounge area; hence the table-tennis table and wall-mounted magnetic Scrabble board. But what of the large, rectangular “lawn”, scattered with quoits and other toddler amusements and colonised by the under-fours? “It was meant to be for petanque,” says Hemmes cheerfully. “But there were delays in obtaining the playing surface, and while I was in there one morning, a young dad came up to me and said, ‘My two-year-old just adores playing in your sandpit, but I reckon you’ve put in the wrong kind of sand’ … And that’s when I realised it was petanque out, playground in, and we put in Astroturf instead.
“With all (Merivale) projects, my aim is to ensure they are adapted to their environment and it was no different with Coogee. I knew it was a very family-focused area so I wanted the Pavilion to be part of that, to be a community hub.”
Integral to the success of all three venues is smart modern standards in food and service, a sea change from the old kid-friendly cafe stereotype of bad food and slow service — the price you were expected to pay, apparently, for the privilege of having your child kept at bay for a half-hour. At Coogee Pav, staff ferry plates of fish and chips, pizza, composed salads and green smoothies to smiling tables of mums with babies in prams and toddlers in high chairs mixing with child-free grown-ups. It’s hard to tell the kids’ food from the adults’ food and that’s the point: while the new breed of integrated restaurants all have kids’ menus — unrecognisable from the bad old days of chicken nuggets and co — who needs one, anyway, when your on-trend standard menu has lots of healthy options designed for sharing, if not also eating with your hands?
Not every restaurateur is in a position, of course, to do what Adelaide’s Tom Hannah is promising for the impending relaunch of the Kent Town Hotel as a multi-function fun parlour complete with separate Jungle Restaurant — think 80m bridge, four tree houses, rock-faced water feature, kids’ play station cave and, in another area, a slide from the rooftop to the ground floor. (We hear the food, centred on a Brazilian churrasco grill, is no afterthought, either.)
But even the most modest suburban eatery can still get in the right spirit. At La Svolta in my neighbourhood of Prahran, Melbourne, the staff didn’t miss a beat from the moment we sat down, bringing crayons and balls of pizza dough for three-year-old Juliette to play with and smiling indulgently as she climbed on to the restaurant’s toy replica scooter.
At Ladro, also in Prahran, a blackboard near the kitchen helps keep the littlies amused; at Green Park, North Carlton, there’s a designated kids’ area, with toys and books, as well as a playground outside.
Every parent I know has a story of how a dinner out with the kids turned into a disaster. An expensive, miserable disaster. You want restaurant recommendations? Well yes, now I can give you a few. My, Australia, how you’ve grown.
Source : The Australia Necia Wildon December 2nd 2014
