Adam Platt: Family-Friendly Picks

I would not say I live in a family of foodies. My wife was raised in a picky Chicago household that lived on Pepsi and junk food. Seafood never darkened their door, salad was something the French ate. I was raised in a family of opinionated, traveled, food-preoccupied people. Our DNA comingled and produced a daughter that will eat every fruit God has created, but no vegetables (OK, ketchup). She demands of every restaurant, no matter how upscale, that it prepare corn dogs. Her last meal will be at Chili’s. My skeletal son veers between bouts of culinary ambition—gumbo, peel-and-eat shrimp, caesar salad—and days when the only thing he can work up a taste for is candy. (His last meal will be Halloween.) He is tiring of $8 multicourse kids' menus and now defaults to “do they have a filet?” (Do you have forty bucks?) Eating out can be a challenge with this lot. Still, we’ve found a number of restaurants where we all leave happy (even if that result hinges on an operable gumball machine at the door). If we can, trust me, you and your kids can too.

Campiello is the most upscale restaurant on this list, but it’s one of the few food-focused restaurants in town that are gladly and willingly able to adapt its menu staples into simple food that kids will eat. Pizza, pasta, killer calamari, simple hanger steak, or salmon. The short ribs remain an iconic dish that adventurous kids and all adults will enjoy. The cooking is careful, the food refined but robust, and there are no sinkholes on the menu. The pre-6 p.m. prix fixe multicourse special is the bargain of the century. Campiello is plenty loud, so voluble kids are no problem, but it’s still a gracious restaurant and may be more than you want to take on if your kids are in a particularly wild phase.

We are regulars at The Cheesecake Factory, which makes my friends and colleagues cringe. But that’s snobbery, plain and simple. The restaurant uniformly shows up in most of Zagat’s guides as a top-forty selection, and that’s because of the breadth of its menu (something for everyone) and scratch cooking, from salad dressings to sauces to soups. We’ve been taught to avoid restaurants that try to be all things to all people, but TCF carries it off. It’s not the best Mexican restaurant in town, or even in the top five, but its spicy chicken tacos are generous and tasty and your date can have pizza. It’s also one of the few restaurants in town that serves skirt steak, which I grew up eating and is one of the most flavorful value-oriented cuts around. Tell me you’ve had better spicy, crispy chicken or grilled eggplant sandwich than TCF’s. Salads are sublime, and everyone loves the avocado egg rolls with cilantro sauce. There’s a bunch of off-menu dishes and drinks sized for kids, not to mention a complimentary fruit and bread plate for babies and the impatient set.

Good Day Café cranks it out, in the tradition of short-order restaurants, and has quick service and massive turnover typical of the genre. The core of its breakfast/lunch menu is food from the Original Pancake House franchise—huge apple pancakes, soufflé omelets, thick-cut bacon, whipped butter. But the offerings here are broader, with steel-cut oatmeal, huckleberry muffins, beignets, huevos rancheros—all tasty and from scratch. There are lots of finger foods and minipancakes for kids. The lunch menu is lesser known, with good burgers, steak sandwiches, and even credible crab cakes. Weekend waits are mind-boggling, so call ahead. Service ranges from grandmotherly to borderline hostile, in the great diner tradition.