Best Kids' Menu Ever - Bluefin Restaurant in Middleton

Back when we lived in Cambridge's Porter Square, we frequently ate at Bluefin Restaurant in the Porter Exchange, which also houses part of Lesley University. Bluefin offers delicious traditional Japanese cuisine at reasonable prices. Our kids love the sushi, especially the tofu-wrapped inari, and my younger daughter particularly enjoys their miso soup. I love their bento boxes and their udon noodle soup.

When we moved out to the North Shore, we decided to try their restaurant in Middleton. To our surprise, the menu was subtly different. While all of our old favorites were present, they also offered what has got to be the best kids' menu I have ever seen. For $7.50 (admittedly pricey), your child gets to choose four of the following offerings:

• Crispy Fried Chicken
• Shumai Dumplings
• French Fries
• Deep Fried Shrimps
• Sweet Potato Tempura
• Sweet Corn
• Rice
• Fresh Fruit
• Chicken Tempura
• Chicken Cutlet
• Sausage

Why on earth hasn't anyone thought of this before? This is picky eater heaven. The child has total control over their dish. My picky elder daughter ordered shumai, sweet potato tempura, chicken tempura, and rice. My younger daughter ordered deep fried shrimps, sweet corn, fresh fruit, and sausage. And blissfully, everyone was happy.

I'd love to see them add miso soup, some sushi - say three or four pieces of cucumber maki, or one inari - and generally some green vegetables. I'd love it even more if they had a less expensive option to choose only three items for younger children who eat less.

More generally, I'd be delighted if this became a meme copied by other restaurants in the area. What if a seafood restaurant offered kids the choice of fish, shrimp, hot dog, corn on the cob, deep fried zucchini, french fries, rice pilaf, and apple slices? What a great, well balanced meal your child could put together for herself.

Stone Hearth Pizza, Belmont, MA

It's not often that I get the opportunity to write one post for two blogs, but Stone Hearth Pizza in Belmont, MA fits the bill. We've dined at the Stone Hearth Pizza in Cambridge near Porter Sq., but the restaurant there is small, cramped, and suffers from slow service. We'd heard that the Belmont restaurant was larger and had better kid amenities, so we decided to check it out.

The Belmont restaurant is indeed about three times the size of the Cambridge location and rather more plush, but it had no kid amenities at all. And where the Cambridge location has one wall covered with placemats colored in by their underage patrons, the Belmont location has no such kid-friendly atmosphere.

The food, as always, is quite good. Stone Hearth Pizza uses local, mostly organic ingredients. Their menu and their pizza boxes feature a map of New England showing exactly where their ingredients come from (see a complete list here). Their pizzas are inventive and tasty. Our favorites are the Sausage and Carmelized Onion pizza and Bacon and Blue pizza.

This time out, we tried the Farm Fresh pizza, which sounded great on paper: "Garlic oil, cherry tomatoes, charred red/yellow peppers, Yukon gold potatoes, artichoke hearts, green/black olives, fresh mozzarella, topped with salad of arugula/red onion/prosciutto." Unfortunately, the olives completely overwhelmed the flavors of the other vegetables. When we picked the olives off (to our omnivorous two-year-old's delight), we discovered that the pizza without them had hardly any flavor at all.

The girls had better luck with their pizzas. Our five-year-old practically inhaled her cheese pizza, and our two-year-old had to compete with her daddy to finish her cheeseburger pizza. We knew from past experience to stay away from the mac 'n' cheese, which was oddly too spicy for the kids to eat. I like it that way, but the kids won't touch it.

The kid's meals included drinks (lemonade and chocolate milk, respectively) and desserts, a choice of cookies or gelato. Both girls chose the gelato, vanilla and chocolate respectively, and my husband also ordered the hazelnut. The vanilla gelato's vanilla flavor was overpowering, and my five-year-old gratefully traded her sister for the chocolate when she was done with it. My husband's hazelnut gelato was chunky with bits of hazelnut but also somehow over-flavored. The chocolate, however, was quite good.

Regardless of how good the meals were and the quality of the ingredients, we got some mild sticker shock from the price: $8.50 for a kid's meal is a bit much, especially when we paid only $12.50 for our own pizza. Then again, when you do the math, an 8" cheese pizza is $5.60, a drink is $2, and gelato is $4 (two cookies are $1), for a total of $11.60, which means the kid's meal is actually a bargain. I do wish, however, that just one of the kid's meals had included vegetables.

Overall, while I applaud Stone Hearth Pizza's commitment to local, organic foods, I'm not all that impressed by either their pizzas or their prices. Zing! Pizza in Porter Sq. also uses local, organic ingredients, has more interesting and inventive pizzas, is less expensive, and they deliver. Their restaurant is seriously tiny, though, so if you want to eat out, Stone Hearth pizza is a better bet. If you're eating in Cambridge, I recommend that you call ahead and order in advance to compensate for the slow wait staff. For the record, the service at the Belmont location was fine.

Restaurant ratings:

2 smileys for good, friendly service


4 carrots for exceedingly healthy food

 

2 moos for slightly pricey food, particularly the kid's meals

Not So Friendly's

Disclaimer: I don't like "family dining" restaurant chains. In my experience, they're family-friendly only in that they're cheap, and that means poor quality and virtually no fresh vegetables. So I was already skeptical when some friends told us that Friendly's had changed its menu and was now actually a pretty decent place to eat. In particular, they said, their new grilled chicken pesto sandwich was quite good. Last night, we gave in and agreed to give Friendly's another try.

Once again, I was reminded of why I hate restaurants like this. Just because you have gaudily painted walls, ample high chairs, and ice cream sundaes, that doesn't make you a kid-friendly restaurant. We went to the Friendly's in Bedford, which was cramped and nearly windowless with no play space for the kids. And the service, while indeed friendly, was glacially slow.

Dining with children is a race: will the food arrive before the kids completely melt down in their seats? Any restaurant that caters to families with small children ought to understand this. In this respect, Friendly's failed miserably. We ordered our food, and five precious minutes later, the waitress came back and informed us that they were out of pesto, which meant that three of the adults had to reorder. Had the waitress been clever, she would have put in the kid's orders in advance. Instead, our meal was delayed by ten minutes.

By the time the Fribble milkshakes arrived, the kids were already thoroughly bored of their crayons and activity placemats. The Fribbles and serial trips to the potty kept them occupied for about half of the remaining time-to-food. Fortunately, we had gone to Arlington Town Day in the morning, and I had various toys the kids had won at carnival games: yo-yo, articulated snake, bracelets and magnifying glasses. This bought another five minutes or so. I began converting placemats into paper airplanes. We played musical chairs. We had just started a game of 20 questions when the food arrived.

The adult food arrived first, and they had gotten my order wrong (honey barbeque chicken sandwich instead of honey mustard chicken sandwich, and no side salad). We bought off the kids with french fries until their Kraft Mac 'n' Cheese finally arrived, and then it was too hot to eat. Quick! Remind them of the Fribbles. Finally, the pasta cooled, my food arrived, and we could all eat.

To be fair, my chicken sandwich was pretty good, if rather messy (dripping honey mustard sauce everywhere), and the kids' meals do now offer vegetable sides (our two-year-old omnivore got broccoli and then stole her sister's franks). The salad, on the other hand, was pathetic: iceberg lettuce topped with red onion rings, shredded cheese, croutons, and exactly two cherry tomatoes. And my fries were, well, limp.

Then came time to order ice cream, which we felt honor-bound to stay and eat because it came free with our food. This entailed another round of kid entertainment, consisting mostly of the potty-trained going to the bathroom again and my rather tired two-year-old curling up in my lap. We arrived at Friendly's around 5:30. We left at 7:45, full but exhausted.

The one good thing about this experience was that it was vastly cheap, coming to less than $40 for a family of four. But I would gladly have paid more for swift, competent service and happier children.

Restaurant Ratings:

1 smiley for lousy amenities and service.


1 carrot for generally unhealthy food.


1 moo for dirt cheap prices.

Not Your Average Joe's - Arlington, MA

It's been a few years since we dared try Not Your Average Joe's restaurant in Arlington Center. While I've always liked the fresh, delicious food, and the staff have been indulgent of child diners, my elder daughter found the room far too enticing and would keep wiggling out of her seat and running delightedly around the restaurant. Chasing her became too much of a chore, especially when I was vastly pregnant, so we stopped going.

Today, with our elder daughter, now five years old, and her much calmer two-year-old sibling, we tried Not Your Average Joe's again for lunch, and we were pleased with the results.

NYAJ's decor is fun and interesting. While the carpet and seating are in soft, muted colors, the top 18 inches or so of every wall is painted with colored squares and dots. Rod iron sculptures are scattered throughout the room: people on swings, a human pyramid, hands on the walls on which to hang coats, hangers over the brick oven for the pizza servers, etc. The yellow, orange, and blue lamps over the booths and bar area give the room a warm glow. We were easily able to distract our energetic five-year-old with these fun features: how many yellow lamps do you see? How many sculptures of people on swings? How many dots painted on the wall have two colors? Our two-year-old happily drew with crayons and munched on the delicious bread.

The kids' menu is quite good, offering cheese pizza, mac and cheese, hand-breaded chicken fingers, grilled cheese, and pasta with butter or tomato sauce for young kids. For older kids, they have balsamic glazed salmon, sirloin tips, angus sirloin burger, and grilled chicken. About half of these dishes come with a choice of side: french fries, vegetables, or fresh fruit. For our kids, we ordered the mac and cheese and the angus burger with green beans. We also ordered a side of cooked carrots. When I mentioned that we were going to be splitting the food between the girls, the waitress offered to have that done for us in the kitchen.

And they did. Each girl got a bowl with half a kid's portion of mac and cheese and a plate with half the angus burger, green beans, and carrots. Now, here's the best part: the girls were so happy with the mac and cheese and the vegetables, they didn't even touch the burgers (well, our elder daughter took one nibble).

As for the adults, I had the spinach and pear salad, which was awesome, exactly what I'd been wanting, and my husband had the chicken piccata, one of his favorites, which also came with green beans. The beans were cooked perfectly - just slightly crunchy. The carrots were also sweet and delicious but not mushy. The mac and cheese was lovely, neither overly bland nor overly rich. Honestly, the least tasty thing we got was, in fact, the burger. Which is not to say that it was bad; it was just... a burger.

We didn't stay for the kids' free ice cream dessert - our two-year-old was curled up on the booth seat trying to nap by the end of the meal - but we did leave satisfied and happy. For such a reasonable price, the food quality was excellent, and so was the service. The one thing that would make this restaurant perfect would be a kids' corner, where quick or picky eaters can go to hang out, letting their slower-eating parents enjoy their meal. By the end of the meal, our five-year-old was scaling the back of the booth and escaping once again, but now she's old enough that she was merely asserting her independence and desire for more personal space by annexing the booth behind us. Fortunately, Sunday lunches appear to be pretty slow there, and the booth - along with 3/4 of the restaurant - was unoccupied.

- 3 smileys for good service and fun atmosphere
- 3 carrots for healthy food
- 1 moo for reasonable price

Added Ratings

When I posted my first two restaurant reviews, I failed to use my smiley/carrot/moo rating system. I've now updated both posts with ratings, listed at the end of each post.

Resource: FoodieMommy

My husband came across a great blog: FoodieMommy. This site lists several kid-friendly restaurants in the Boston area. We'll have to try them all for ourselves.

Alfresco Restaurant, 382 Highland Ave, Somerville, MA

Alfresco Restaurant, in the former location of Out of the Blue near Davis Square, has been one of our favorites for a while. Its Sunday brunch got rave reviews a year or so ago, and we've therefore avoided the Sunday brunch, but we like to go during the week, when it's quiet and uncrowded.

Alfresco serves consistently delicious Italian food, always a kid-pleaser, and it's reasonably priced, with the most expensive dish around $15. We used to get the seafood bruschetta every time we came until we got thoroughly sick of it. The restaurant is small and has no kid amenities beyond high chairs, but that block of Highland Ave has plenty to interest small kids, including When Pigs Fly bakery for fresh bread, the Dairy Bar for fresh, local goods (milk in glass bottles!), and Kick*ss Cupcakes for dessert. So we order, then one of us takes the kids for a walk. The food comes, we sit the kids down to eat, and when they're done, the other of us takes them for another walk. It works out nicely.

A few days ago, with our kitchen faucet broken and no running water in the kitchen, we threw our hands up and went out to Alfresco for dinner. There, we got not only great food but, hands down, the best, most kid-friendly service we've ever experienced. It was amazing.

First, since the restaurant was nearly empty when we arrived, the waitress who met us let the kids pick their table. There were two waitresses who served us more or less equally and worked very well as a team. We ordered our drinks, and they brought milk in a take-out coffee cup with a straw for our two-year-old, a pretty common trick that most restaurants use.

While my husband took the kids for a potty break, I ordered: tortellini with prosciutto for my husband, porcini ravioli for myself, fettucine alfredo for the girls to split, and an Alfresco Salad, which was listed as an assortment of grilled vegetables, for all of us to share.

A waitress brought out sliced bread with a dish of olive oil, a dish of spicy red pepper aioli, and a dish of grated parmesan cheese. Our kids dug into this gleefully, dipping in the olive oil, then the parmesan, spreading both liberally over the table. Our two-year-old tried the aioli, burst into tears, and kept on eating it because even with the spiciness, it was delicious.

As they were demolishing the bread, our salad arrived, and here's my one gripe: it was the wrong salad. Instead of grilled vegetables, we got a warm spinach salad. This turned out to be utterly delicious. The spinach was layered with sauteed mushrooms, topped with crispy bits of prosciutto, and ringed with fresh feta-like cheese and slices of tomato, all dressed in a balsamic vinegrette. Our two-year-old claimed half the tomatoes, and my husband and I ate the rest with glee.

And then the waitresses arrived to clear the table for our entrees. To our complete astonishment and delight, they didn't just take away the empty plates. They removed the now-empty breadbasket and the accompanying dishes, and they CLEANED THE TABLE. All of it, the dribbles of olive oil and spatters of parmesan and crusts and general kid-generated clutter, so that we had a clean table when the food came.

And that brought another surprise. Rather than bringing us the fettucine alfredo and two small plates for the girls, they actually served it in two small bowls, half for each, which meant that we could all immediately dig into our dinners. This tiny detail was so thoughtful and lovely that it was sad that the thermal heat of the pasta undid it - we had to spoon off some of the noodles to cool enough for the girls to eat.

And then they brought another breadbasket with olive oil and parmesan, no aioli, for the girls. Quick studies, these women.

After one bite each, my husband and I promptly traded our dishes. I love mushrooms, but I'm not thrilled with cream sauce, and he loves tortellini and prosciutto but not tomato sauce. The trade fixed this problem admirably. The creamy tomato sauce on the tortellini was heavenly, and after I had finished the pasta, I kept snitching bread from the girls to sop up the remaining sauce. My husband expressed similar satisfaction with the cream sauce on his ravioli in contented monosyllables.

We polished off our dishes, but even after dividing the fettucine, there was still enough left over to feed the girls the next day. They wrapped it up for us, along with the remaining bread, while my husband and the girls meandered down the block for cupcakes. When the check came, I gave them a 25% tip and wrote under it, "Best Service Ever." I meant it. Never, in the five years since my first daughter was born, have I experienced the caliber of service that these two women provided us. Perhaps the fact that one of them was pregnant helped.

I urge you to try this restaurant. The food is excellent, the neighborhood is fun, and you'll leave relaxed and happy, a rarity when dining out with children.

EDIT: Restaurant ratings:

3 smileys for fabulous service

3 carrots for healthy food

1 moo for low price