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.

The Challenge of Dining with Small Children

If you live in the Boston area and have small children - and by this I mean children too young to reliably sit still and not throw food at each other and you - you may be experiencing the problem I have: finding good restaurants where both you and your children enjoy eating. I've found that many so-called children's restaurants (Friendly's, Chuck E. Cheese, etc.) have miserable food for both the kids and the adults, and most restaurants with food I like eating lack either good kid's menus, a comfortable, kid-friendly environment, or amenable service. Having found two good restaurants in the past week, I've decided to start up yet another blog so that I can share them with the local Boston community.

I will use the following rating system:

• Smileys: These indicate how kid-friendly the restaurant is, including service and play space, if any.
  
• Carrots: These indicate how healthy the kid's menu offerings are. Bonus points for local food.
• Moos: Short for moolah, these indicate how expensive the food was.

In all cases, one = worst and five=best.

Now, on with the reviews!