The set-up has about as much to do with reality as a reality tv show: record the hilarity that will surely ensue when one man takes five pre-schoolers to eat at one of New York City's best restaurants. The restaraunt: Le Cirque, which was just a couple of months away from closing anyway, and figured it had nothing to lose. The man: Adam Platt, who just happens to be the restaurant critic for New York Magazine.
And suddenly the weird self-hating parent vibe running through the piece becomes clear. Obviously, sometime in 2004, a few patrons of the city's finer restaurants were feeling--who knew such a thing was even possible?--over-entitled and started bringing their kids along. Alarmed, Platt and his seen (last with the nanny, I think) and not heard (unless uttering an urbane anecdote fit for Metropolitan Diary) magazine sprang into action. With this over-the-top kids-in-nice-restaurant horror story, NYM helps keep the mini-hoi-polloi from storming the gates of Le Bernardin for another year and gets to indulges its readerships' guilty taste for parenting snuff films.
Eat and Run [nymag]
