As you might be aware, we have two kids. We also occasionally like to eat out at restaurants. Inevitably this ends up with an order of macaroni and cheese ordered from the kids menu. Abby is starting to order some more interesting things these days, but that’s really not the point of what I’m writing here. What I’m interested in are the menus themselves.
Depending on the restaurant, you get a varying quality of children’s menu. Some places simply have the menu as a box tucked into a corner of the adult menu, but the interesting ones are full-color activity booklets that come with a pack of crayons. I find these activity books interesting, and themselves widely varying.
There are some bad ones. For example, Uno Chicago Grill has one of the worst kid’s menus around. It has a promising two-color outside, and a lousy activity center on the inside. The activities include basic maze that’s so simple you can do it blindfolded, and a “find the differences” puzzle that is a poorly reproduced monochrome photograph too difficult to make out alone yet compare the two photos.
One of the better menus is from Cheeseburger in Paradise. Their full-color menu books have activities on every page. There is also a symbol code, as described on one of the pages, that runs in the border of every page. There is a requisite 80% blank coloring area for free-form doodles, and a few things to color in.
The bulk of chain restaurant menus fall in the range between these two. They’re usually a newspaper-grade 11×17 sheet in full color with the restaurant’s “kid mascot” plastered all over it with a handful of unimaginative, unchallenging games. Mascots include that dog “Scraps” at Max and Ermas, the eponymous “Red Robin”, and some freaky little baseball dude at TGIFriday’s.
Some of the menus have a theme, most that have a theme are usually themed for the restaurant. For example, Cheeburger Cheeburger offers nice quality photocopies of their puzzle menu, which include jokes about burgers and a hamburger to color. Nothing like brainwashing your kid into loving their food.
And the never-ending tic-tac-toe boards. Please. Abby has now mastered tic-tac-toe. At least, she has on a good day. When every game is a tie, it’s time to move on.
What I always used to like were the Highlights Magazine hidden puzzles; the ones where they draw a scene and hide 10-15 objects in the lines of the drawing. So a tree might be hidden as a chef’s hat, or a winter hat might be hidden upside-down as a sundae dish. Those are always good because they can also be colored if the kid doesn’t want to hunt, or if the kid is through hunting.
Seek-n-find’s are ok, but until Abby could read, we were just looking at the letters. Riley has fun with them now just circling letters he knows. I suppose that’s fun enough. Still, more often than not the words are dry, all run the same direction, and don’t even bother to cross.
I won’t even talk about the lame crosswords.
We’ve had some fun lately with the coasters at Red Robin. They each have a clue on them from the game Buzzword. When the buzzword is “ball” every clue indicates an answer that has “ball” as part of it. So if the clue was “on top of spaghetti”, then the answer would be “meatball”. A menu-based game that was more involved like this would be more interesting.
Maybe what I need is an adult kid’s menu?
Anyway, it’s been my thought to concoct one of these things. I’m sure you’ll need to be an eight-year-old member of Mensa to use it, but I think that a menu can be made that is both fun and involved. Usually when our kids want to take home a menu it’s because they’ve colored something nice on it. That’s great. But we often leave behind the ones with puzzles and stuff because they’re just too easy or not worth the effort. What would be nice is a puzzle menu that makes you want to take it home.
It would be interesting to try to create a menu that makes people want to choose a restaurant because they know that their kids will be well-occupied by the menu contents.
I have some ideas. I want to build strata of puzzles, such that a larger, over-arching puzzle lays on top of the obvious ones. As a simple example, there might be a seek-n-find, but the letters left over from the seek-n-find might form a phrase that is useful for solving some other puzzle that is not quite so obvious.
There must be some company that specializes in creating menus such as these. I even have a similar plan for a car activity sheet, based on something I found in a kitchen drawer called a Scribblesmat. As it turns out, they offer custom runs of their products.
I’ll add that as another item on my big to-do list and we’ll see how it turns out. There is some irony to me in that list. Thousands of people want to write a book, but only hundreds want to read more. And apparently, I am the only person who wants to positively influence the world.
Anyway, over the next week I hope to kill off at least one of the items in that big list. Stay tuned.
