If you’ve lived on the Eastside for a while, you can probably remember a place called Pizza and Pipes. The restaurant featured extremely talented keyboardists playing a huge, 1,200-pipe Wurlitzer organ with all the bells and whistles – literally, bells and whistles – along with soap bubbles and puppets.
The place was always teeming with kids – and between them and the mighty Wurlitzer (circa 1925) theater organ, the joint was so loud you might as well have been having dinner alongside a revved-up Boeing 747. But then, that was the point. It was a pizza place designed for young families, the noisier the better.
The building in Bellevue was torn down in 1992 to accommodate a Northeast Sixth street extension for the Meydenbauer Center. Nowadays, that venue doesn’t see or hear many pipes – except for the occasional steam fitter convention.
I was thinking about Pizza and Pipes the other day when I saw a story out of Monroeville, Penn. It had to do with the owner of a place called McDain’s Restaurant whose owner has declared that kids under the age of six are banned from his eatery. Mike Vuick said he’s had enough of complaints about indulgent parents who “fail to shush or remove their unruly rug rats.”
Since the policy went into effect, McDain’s business is up 20 percent – and the decibel level is down 40. So from now on, it’s McDonald’s not McDain’s for kids.
My dad and mom always made sure my siblings and I towed the line in a restaurant. Once a month or so, dad would treat the family to a big breakfast at a local pancake place. One time, when my brother and I started kicking each other under the table (“Ow! How do you like it? Ow!”), Dad stood up and said, “OK, we’re leaving.”
The pancakes had just arrived at our table, but no matter. He said to the waitress, “Please give these pancakes to some kids who can behave themselves.” He paid the bill and we left. I don’t know if the waitress ever found kids who could behave themselves, but from that day on, we kids could and did – lesson learned.
Not everyone agrees that kids are the real problem in a public restaurant. Ultimately, it’s the parents. After all, who hasn’t been in a restaurant, or a mall or an airplane and witnessed something like: “Justin, please don’t scream so loud. Would you please stop? I want you to stop. Please? And Justin, it’s not nice to hit the man. Stop hitting the man, Justin. Please for me? It’s not nice to play with matches. Justin! I want you to apologize to the man for setting him on fire! Please?”
Once, when my youngest son was around four, he became increasingly unruly in an otherwise peaceful restaurant. After asking him to settle down a time or two, my wife gave me a nod – and I arose from our booth and walked outside to the parking lot.
I repositioned our car to a new parking spot – directly outside our booth window. I then walked back inside where our son was now in full screaming mode. I picked him up and carried him out to our car – I think I could hear the other patrons cheer.
I placed him right in the front seat or our car – where we could have a perfect view of him – opened the windows a crack, locked the doors and went back inside.
My wife and I watched him scream on in the car as we waved to him through the restaurant window. After no more than five minutes, the effort had worked. I strolled back out to the car, picked up our now peaceable son and went back inside with him, where our family – and other customers – went on to enjoy a very nice, civilized meal.
That approach won’t show up in any parenting guidebooks, but our son has never been obnoxious or noisome in a public eatery since.
Except last week for some reason at a Denny’s.
But by now, he’s a grown man and outweighs me by 25 pounds.
So I exited the restaurant and went and sat in the car.
Pat Cashman can be reached at pat@patcashman.com.
