Photos by Nicholas L. Hall

Dining out with children is an exercise in situational awareness. Each experience is unique, with different variables leading to different possible outcomes, DEFCON-like in their escalating threat levels. Keen observation, forward planning and prior experience are critical in determining the proper strategy. Here at DEFCON Dining, we do the grunt work for you. It ain't always pretty.

I forgot where Fountain View Café was. I have no idea how. All I know is, I pulled up in front of Harvest Organic Grille, after having waxed more than slightly rhapsodic about pancakes for the previous 25 minutes, only to find Fountain View, that bastion of lace-edged breakfast pastries, inexplicably "gone." Of course, I was just off by one strip-mall section, and apparently blinded by my desire for breakfast foods.

I raised the question on Twitter, no doubt confusing many a hash-brown-hound, and was met with confusion. Nobody knew what I was talking about. A few weeks later, I asked again. Assured that it was still a going concern, though no less baffled by my inability to spot if from 20 yards away, I headed toward Fountain View Café with the wife and kids on a recent Saturday.

Generally, I can count on breakfast as the Switzerland of meals. Everyone loves breakfast, including my sometimes frighteningly picky six year old. If she can order eggs, I can count on order. Or so I thought. I'm not sure what went wrong that weekend. Maybe it was the early wakeup call of a new Saturday activity. Maybe it was the fact that she's a six year old. You can never tell with six year olds. Shifty bunch.

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Nicholas L. Hall

Not pictured: Fiji Mermaid Infused Tequila

On a recent Tuesday night -- our late night, the one on which after-school activities all but force us to dine out instead of cooking -- my youngest daughter said she'd rather go home and eat sandwiches than put on pants. She'd just gotten out of her gymnastics class, clad only in the bathing suit she wears in lieu of a leotard, and was not receptive to the suggestion that additional clothing would be required in a restaurant setting. I can't quite recall how we convinced her to clothe herself, but I'm reasonably sure it involved queso.

I've taken to a bit of strategy surrounding these late Tuesday dinners. With everyone so ready to just get somewhere and shove food in their faces after an extremely long day, I find that it's easier to get my way when it comes to where. Manipulative? Yes. Successful? Usually. It does backfire, typically when the willingness-to-crankiness ratio tilts in the wrong direction. There's a fine line, reasonably gauged by how strongly the wife and kids, respectively, react to the statements "They've got margaritas" and "You can have chips." El Gran Malo fills both of those requirements, and that's where we wound up.

I'd had El Gran Malo on the list for a while, but never got much traction with the suggestion. I think leading with "they've got all these crazy tequila infusions" was a poor strategy, making the kids think it had nothing to offer them, and making my wife fear the resulting insurrection. Reasonable fears, both. Fortunately, they were unfounded.

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Photo by Nicholas L. Hall

Water Boiled Beef needs a punchier name. Or not. Nobody likes a showoff.

Dining out with children is an exercise in situational awareness. Each experience is unique, with different variables leading to different possible outcomes, DEFCON-like in their escalating threat levels. Keen observation, forward planning and prior experience are critical in determining the proper strategy. Here at DEFCON Dining, we do the grunt work for you. It ain't always pretty.

Mala Sichuan Bistro was packed at 7 p.m. the day after Christmas. I had been concerned about taking the kids, as they've been in a bit of a "no new foods" funk of late, and I wasn't sure how they'd respond. As the delicious scents of the dining room hit our noses, each of them perking up and involuntarily sniffing into the tantalizing wind, my concerns were laid to rest. "It smells amazing in here," enthused my oldest. Even my notoriously picky six-year-old nodded in agreement, an encouraging gleam in her eye.

As we waited for a table, back in the slightly chilly foyer, the kids' curiosity further piqued by the boisterous scene inside the dining room, my daughter made an interesting if unsurprising comment. "We're the only people here who aren't Chinese," she observed. "Sometimes, I don't feel as comfortable when nobody else is American."

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Photo by Peter Dutton

"Screw this ball pit, guys. Let's go stand in a really long line and whine and squirm while our parents make futile attempts to quiet us by pinching the tender inner flesh of our upper arms!"

Now listen: I love Urbanspoon. I love that it links directly to professional food critics' reviews of restaurants, so that I have a real sense of a place when I'm in an unfamiliar city. I love the map feature that allows you to find restaurants in different areas of town. (This is especially handy on the iPhone app.) And I love that, unlike Yelp, its users don't seem particularly interested in blackmailing or extorting restaurants for free products in exchange for a good write-up. Urbanspoon is a trusted companion.

Yet I have absolutely no idea how it came up with Niko Niko's as the kid-friendliest restaurant in Houston.

I mean, technically I understand. Urbanspoon says so right in its press release on its new list of America's 100 Most Popular Kid-Friendly Restaurants. Houston only had one nod on the list (which is frankly fine by me, because as Nick Hall has so deftly demonstrated in his ongoing DEFCON Dining series, hell is other people's kids at the table next to you), which was compiled "based on a rating algorithm that includes blog posts on Urbanspoon, diner voting behavior, consumer reviews, critic reviews, and page views."

Have those algorithms never been to Jimmy Changa's?

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Photo by Nicholas L. Hall

What dessert should be.

Dining out with children is an exercise in situational awareness. Each experience is unique, with different variables leading to different possible outcomes, DEFCON-like in their escalating threat levels. Keen observation, forward planning and prior experience are critical in determining the proper strategy. Here at DEFCON Dining, we do the grunt work for you. It ain't always pretty.

If you do enough DEFCON Dining, you need a break every once in a while. Think of it like shore leave. A chance to take your mind off the rigors of battle; a chance to interact with civilians; a chance, maybe, to pretend you are one, if just for a little while.

We spent the summer shopping for a house, and finally found one right at the start of the school year. Throughout the process, we had a lot of late-night, last-ditch meals. After a day spent driving around looking at houses (not at the top of my nine and six year olds' to-do lists, surprisingly), we usually just wanted to get some calories in them and get them to bed. It was, quite often, DEFCON Dining taken to extremes. We did things, saw things, man, that nobody should ever have to see. I still wake up screaming sometimes. . .

The day we closed on our house, I needed a drink. Something to make me temporarily forget that I had just agreed to spend multiple times my yearly salary on a piece of land the size of a postage stamp. Something to make me feel . . . civilized. I suppose that there's a sort of tongue in cheek "irony" to the fact that I chose a place called Underbelly for that particular task.

See Also:
100 Favorite Dishes 2012: No. 1, Korean Braised Goat and Dumplings at Underbelly

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Photo by Nicholas L. Hall

Vegetables and fish-dip. Apparently, this is kid food.

Dining out with children is an exercise in situational awareness. Each experience is unique, with different variables leading to different possible outcomes, DEFCON-like in their escalating threat levels. Keen observation, forward planning and prior experience are critical in determining the proper strategy. Here at DEFCON Dining, we do the grunt work for you. It ain't always pretty.

Talking your children through what's expected of them at dinner is not always enough. If you don't actually put them out there, in the trenches with live fire, they'll never be truly ready. I'm not talking Applebee's, here. That would be like preparing soldiers for war by having them play the balloon-popping squirt gun games at a carnival. Sure, they might win a giant teddy bear, but they still won't know what to do when the shrapnel is flying. If you want them to be ready to eat at real restaurants, you have to take them to real restaurants.We're finally making some real headway, as discussed in my recent post about Oxheart.

We've spent a lot of time and effort putting our kids, and ourselves, through DEFCON Dining boot camp. With each success, and each failure, we've learned valuable lessons about how to win this particular war. When we decided to spend a few days in Austin over the summer, we decided to put those lessons into action, taking the kids along to one of the nicer places we'd hazarded in a while, and I had Foreign & Domestic in the cross hairs.

Vacations can be a great time to hazard a nice meal with your kids; the sense of adventure is ripe, and it's a good idea to pluck it while you can. We planned our dinner after a day of kayaking, extending the sense of newness and excitement. We also planned it before a couple of activities high on the kids' itinerary. A healthy balance of carrots and sticks can be tremendously motivational. Fortunately, we didn't end up needing any of the sticks, and the meal provided its own carrots.

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Photo by Nicholas L. Hall

They like it! Hey, Mikey!

Dining out with children is an exercise in situational awareness. Each experience is unique, with different variables leading to different possible outcomes, DEFCON-like in their escalating threat levels. Keen observation, forward planning and prior experience are critical in determining the proper strategy. Here at DEFCON Dining, we do the grunt work for you. It ain't always pretty.

I made my elder daughter cry within five minutes of sitting down to dinner at Oxheart. We'd been through all the usual discussions about etiquette and attitude, and were riding high on the success of a recent dinner at Foreign & Domestic in Austin. We were ready for this one. Then, I mentioned the blood paintings.

Just inside the restaurant's front door hangs a series of canvases sparingly decorated with semi-stylized images of vegetables in bright shades of crimson. Carrots, peas, beets, all dipped and drawn in pig's blood. They're lovely and interesting, and they captivated my children's interest immediately.

We'd already been discussing the origin and meaning of Oxheart's name, and it seemed appropriate to explain the artwork's connection to the restaurant's carnal/vegetal themes. As I was describing how the vegetables had been cut and dragged through the blood, used as stamps to create their own images and to further reinforce the simultaneous duality and continuum of the restaurant's character, my daughter gently cupped her face in her hands, hiding the hot but silent tears that had begun sliding down her cheeks.

She's a sure carnivore, but a sensitive one, and she was weeping for the pigs whose lives had been given, whose blood had been spilt for those canvases. Of course, that didn't stop her from eating her share of tête de cochon later that evening. I think there's something beautiful and somehow appropriate about that.

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Photo by Nicholas L. Hall

Talk to me again in December, haleem.

Dining out with children is an exercise in situational awareness. Each experience is unique, with different variables leading to different possible outcomes, DEFCON-like in their escalating threat levels. Keen observation, forward planning and prior experience are critical in determining the proper strategy. Here at DEFCON Dining, we do the grunt work for you. It ain't always pretty.

I remember the first time it happened. In vivid detail. My youngest was still not in school, I was still working Shift Work, it was a weekday. Back then, it was not at all uncommon for my wife and me to take the little one for breakfast after we'd unloaded her sister at school. Totally unfair, I know; we took lots of well-deserved shit from big sis for that setup.

One morning, we decided we were in need of enchiladas for breakfast, and headed over to Los Dos Amigos. My wife and I had been many times, but it was a first for the kid. We only stayed for 12 seconds. Four steps in the door, my daughter announced, loudly and seemingly to the whole restaurant, "This place smells really weird." We didn't come back for a month.

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Photo by Nicholas L. Hall

This should be as delicious as it looks. Make it so.

Dining out with children is an exercise in situational awareness. Each experience is unique, with different variables leading to different possible outcomes, DEFCON-like in their escalating threat levels. Keen observation, forward planning and prior experience are critical in determining the proper strategy. Here at DEFCON Dining, we do the grunt work for you. It ain't always pretty.

I don't know how many times, as a parent, I've found myself saying "Don't eat (X) with your fingers!" Insert pretty much whatever you want into that equation; the algebra of child dining etiquette has no set boundary condition. (Misapplied, mixed math metaphors for the win.) At any rate, I have at various times substituted each of the following for (X): spaghetti; salad; omelet; cake; queso; ice cream; soup. Mind you, each of these conditions has occurred within the last year. My kids are eight and six. Yes, this is pertinent.

I can't imagine not having previously mentioned that my family is A) a bunch of ridiculously late risers and B) somewhat worryingly obsessed with breakfast foods. To state the obvious, brunch is our game. For a while, Xuco Xicana stood as one of our go-to brunch spots. The way in which Chef Jonathan Jones managed to combine ridiculously comforting, approachable food with always exciting flavors and preparations made it perfect for a family split down the middle between finicky starch-and-dairy lovers and enthusiastic omnivores. We've missed that place.

As the short hand approached the two last Sunday, talk turned to food, and I tossed Concepción out into the ether, hoping that it would pique my wife's interest, turning the wheel away from Le Peep, toward which the kids seemed to be steering the ship. "Does it have the same food as XX?" inquired my wife. I lied. Sort of. I mean, from what I'd heard, I had a reasonable assumption that there would be some analogues. Whatever. It got us there.

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Photo by Nicholas L. Hall

The cookie was actually purple. Apparently, my camera is white-balance challenged.

Dining out with children is an exercise in situational awareness. Each experience is unique, with different variables leading to different possible outcomes, DEFCON-like in their escalating threat levels. Keen observation, forward planning and prior experience are critical in determining the proper strategy. Here at DEFCON Dining, we do the grunt work for you. It ain't always pretty.

For the longest time, we were hesitant to go to Paulie's. Looking back, I'm not entirely sure why that was the case. My wife and I were talking about it just the other day, and the best answer we could settle on is the fact that Paulie's felt a bit too adult for us. In a way, something about the austerity of the interior lent it more gravitas than many much more reserved joints. There was a quiet about it, and we didn't want to ruin that for the rest of the diners. Boy, are we glad we got over that. The cookies sure helped.

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