The other day, while catching up with an American mom in Italy, she told me about her friend in Los Angeles who got kicked out of a restaurant. It wasn’t because she was drunk or couldn’t afford to pay the bill. A restaurant worker asked her to leave because her toddler was having a meltdown, apparently disturbing other customers.
I gasped, but internally, I wasn’t surprised. When I lived in California, dining out often felt like a precarious endeavor. It always seemed like my toddler had to have perfect behavior if we wanted to be welcomed back to that restaurant. We knew which restaurants were “family-friendly” and which ones it just felt inappropriate to bring a tiny little human after 5 p.m.
