Kiddie meals

I'm convinced restaurants make their profits on kiddie meals.

For the second time, I realized I got totally ripped off by ordering a kiddie meal. I was at Country Gourmet with Pora and Dan when Tobey chose to have pasta for his $4.25 kiddie meal. Fine. Except he didn't want the red sauce. Fine, I order butter and cheese. And because I knew Tobey would everything on his plate and I wanted crab quiche (but we haven't introduced seafood to Eli), I had to order something for Eli too.

When Tobey got his food, it hit me: I just paid $4.25 for a bowl of plain pasta. It was literally plain because the butter and cheese? Well, they gave us 3 pats of butter on the side and said the parmesan was in a jar on the table. All I could think of was that even expensive pasta is $2.39 at Safeway when not on sale, and for a whole pound! To add insult to injury, the pasta doesn't come with anything else. Luckily Eli's plate did, some chips and grapes, some of which Tobey also ate.

Almost this exact same thing happened at Amici's having lunch with Ines. It annoys me to no end and yet, unless I start hauling around special food for my kids or split my plate with them and never get to order what I want, I am cornered into ordering kiddie meals. So far pho and Chipotle are still good deals for us and lucky for us, those are the places we frequent the most.