I’m not eating that!

We stopped at The Manhattan Fish Market on the weekend while shopping at Jusco Tebrau City. The Tebrau Jusco shopping complex is a bigger version of the one in Bukit Indah and it has a Harris/Popular book store, so it’s worth the additional mileage (kilometreage?) to get there.

When we first visited The Manhattan Fish Market 3 years ago, it was superb. The food was fantastic, the service top-notch, there were discount vouchers for future visits. Then, I don’t know what happened. The size of the side sauces that come with the meals diminished greatly, the staff became lacklustre in performance and the food, while still okay, didn’t quite zing any more.

Last weekend, giving it one last try before we scratched it from our list of favourite restaurants, The Wast ordered the grilled fish with rice and found two small stones in the rice before I told him to stop eating it. The price of the meal was deducted from our bill, but we couldn’t help but reflect on the falling standards in what used to be a very nice restaurant.

(As a note, The Manhattan Fish Market is a Malaysian-owned and -created restaurant chain. It’s also not cheap, by Malaysian standards. The grilled fish of the day with a drink cost RM23++.)

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. The Wast is very clear on what he eats when we go out, and our ten year-old doesn’t order from the kids’ menus. “The food on the kids’ menu isn’t very nice,” he told me on Saturday. “It all tastes the same and it’s boring.”

He has a point. The Fish Market’s three kid choices were, from memory, fish nuggets with chips, calamari rings with chips, or fish nuggets with calamari rings with chips. Kids at Kinsahi, a Johor-based chain of Japanese restaurants, have a similar choice of fried vaguely Japanese (or other) looking food with fried potato stars and/or chips. Why would you take your children to an otherwise excellent Japanese restaurant only to order them spaghetti with chips? When you start paying attention, you’ll notice that the children’s menu items are way below standard compared to the adult offerings, often greasy, unimaginative and carelessly compiled. Little Dinosaur ordered a kids meal @ Fish Market but the nuggets she received were strangely too soft under their batter, almost a puree. Being the less discriminatory type that she is, she told us it was “nice” but ended up not eating most of it.

It wasn’t until The Wast explained the facts of kiddy eating-out life to me, compounded by Little Dinosaur’s meal, that I saw the truth in what he was saying.

Do kids get such a bad deal when it comes to restaurant food because they aren’t the ones paying the bill? If we are enjoying our meals, do we blithely assume the quality of our children’s food must be equivalent and carry on regardless? Or is it a case of just being relieved that there’s something “kid-friendly” on the menu (buying into the pernicious myth that kids only enjoy food with deep-fried potato strips next to it) and so we’re content to close our eyes to sub-standard quality? (I have to admit, I’ve been guilty of that.)

Right now, though, I have no excuse. Over the past year, we’ve been moving to a policy of always checking that what we feel like eating (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai, kopitiam, Taiwanese, Hong Kong cafe, ramen, steamboat, bbq grill, seafood, etc.) is close to what the kids also feel like eating. If we can’t come to a consensus, we leave and find another restaurant. The Wast has been eating from the adult menu for months now (mostly because the kid portions are too small for him. He’s as skinny as a rake, so where he puts all that food I’ll never know!) and I think, after this past weekend, I’ll be pushing finicky, fussy Little Dinosaur more aggressively to do the same. I know what this means — more restaurant-hopping, more cycles as we wait for our children to look over a variety of menus, more disgruntled opinions — but The Wast was right to point out the lower quality of kids’ meals, and we’re happy to listen. It means a bigger restaurant bill, but this is their nutrition and satisfaction we’re talking about. When it comes to food quality, children, and teaching them about quality, you have to go for the best you can afford. It’s as simple as that.