The Swedish touch

by Amy A little while ago I posted on my own blog about the dos and don'ts for servers in family restaurants and Lara asked me about doing reviews of how kid friendly restaurants around Ottawa are.

Now, I have my own criteria, but I've discovered that one of my favourite places to take the kid for a meal right now is Ikea. Yes, Ikea.

There are a number of complaints about shopping at the actual store, but the Ikea restaurants is great for kids. There are a lot of reasons we've eaten at Ikea twice in the past two weeks. One is cost - who can resist a dollar breakfast when you're buying a $600 piece of furniture? But the other things that I liked surprised me.

Variety: The restaurant has a pretty good number of choices for on the children's menu and it all seems fairly good. Some places your choice is between something fried or white pasta, but my daughter had meatballs with mashed potatoes and a milk to drink. She was a big fan of the lingonberry jam, which is a bit weird.

Serving size: The servings are absolutely reasonable for a child.

Utensils: Ikea uses their own stuff to stock the restaurant and for the children's meals that means plastic plates, kid sized utensils, plastic cups. This is the only place I remember eating that a fork she looked comfortable using.

And the best part? After spending more than two hours walking around the store, kid actually napped.

Amy is mom to two year old Maggie and a 6 year old schnauzer named Henry. You can read her blog at amyboughner.ca where she writes about motherhood and anything else that’s on her mind. She also shares a blog with her husband at boughner.ca where they talk together about parenting a daughter.