How to Create Kids-friendly Restaurants – Tips to Attract Families

As customers, kids are probably the most demanding lot. However, since they can impact their parent’s ordering decisions significantly, you cannot ignore them. Children are perhaps the most lucrative and promising demographic for a restaurant.

As a restaurant owner, serving families with young kids might appear as a tempting prospect. However, merely designing a separate menu for kids seldom makes kids-friendly restaurant. From your restaurant’s design to its menu, creating a kid-friendly atmosphere in your restaurant requires you to consider several factors.

How to Create Kids-friendly Restaurant: Top 7 Tips

Let’s discuss how you can create a kids-friendly restaurant and how to market your restaurant to attract families.

1. Offer Appropriate Menu Option for Kids

Irrespective of your restaurant’s cuisine, you can include popular food items like pizza, fries, nuggets, mac & cheese, etc. on your menu. Alternatively, you can also consider including your restaurant’s signature dishes in child-size portions.

To better attract kids’ attention, you can name your dishes creatively and include drawings and/or stock-photos on your menu. Here are some additional tips to consider while designing the kids-friendly menu for your restaurant.

A. Ensure your Menu Accommodates Allergies

Since every parent is understandably concerned about their kid’s allergies, make sure that items on your menu take care of the most common food allergies like nuts, lactose, soy, etc. More importantly, you must train your kitchen staff in preparing the food for your young guests.

B. Offer Special Weeknight Deals for Families

To attract families on the other-wise slow evening, you can offer discounts or incentives on weeknights. Albeit a purely marketing strategy, deals during non-peak hours can help in recovering the operating costs quickly.

C. Make Healthy and Nutritional Food

As parents become increasingly conscious about junk foods for their kids, you can come up with items that are healthy yet appealing for kids.

2. Food Options Kids Will Actually Eat

Getting kids’ food right matters more than most people realize. Families decide whether to come back based on one thing: did their kids eat well and stay calm?

Here’s what usually goes wrong. Wait times drag on and kids get restless. Tables are too small for booster seats. Chairs are hard and uncomfortable. The menu has maybe one or two things a kid will actually eat. The place looks boring and has sharp corners everywhere. When all that happens, parents finish fast and leave.

You can fix this without much effort. Offer quick dishes that don’t need much prep time — mini burgers, plain pasta, grilled cheese. Keep a kids section on your menu with three reliable choices and one special that changes. Set up a family table or corner with comfortable seating and rounded edges so parents don’t worry about bumps.

Give kids something to do while they wait. Crayons work. A simple coloring sheet or menu game works too. Anything that makes the wait feel shorter.

Here’s why it’s worth doing. Quick kids’ orders mean faster table turns. Fewer complaints mean smoother service. Happy families come back and tell their friends about you. Even if kids’ meals are cheaper, parents who aren’t stressed will order another drink or split a dessert.

Fix these few problems and you’ll build real loyalty with families in your area.

3. Provide Comfortable Restaurant Seating for Kids

When you wish to accommodate kids in your restaurant, you have to make necessary changes in the restaurant seating arrangement and restaurant design as well. You have to buy children high chairs or booster seats in multiple quantities with sufficient cushions to make them sit comfortably because regular or styles restaurant chairs makes kids uncomfortable.

Quite often, children bring their soft-toys, backpacks, etc. In such cases, you can offer them larger tables to accommodate their furry-friends as well.

4. Educate & Train your Staff

Some of your staff may have limited experience dealing with children. Educating and training your workforce can go a long way in creating a comforting atmosphere for kids. Here are a few handy tips for handling kids in your restaurant:

1. Make sure that you offer a table free from any nearby potential hazards like electrical sockets, pots, plants, etc. to the families with kids.
2. During ordering, notice the child’s behavior and take parental cues on how to handle them. While some kids might want to order on their own, others might not be as confident to engage with your restaurant’s staff.
3. Train your restaurant’s staff in dealing with the kid meltdowns. A positive reaction from a supportive staff during such meltdowns helps in building loyalty for your restaurant from the weary parents.
4. The restaurant’s staff must learn and acknowledge the fine line between engaging the customer’s kids and intimidating them. While engaging them with toys, activity charts, etc. might work for some kids, your staff must know when to back off as well.

5. Equip Your Restaurant with Kid-Friendly Supplies

Children have short attention spans. While parents get busy conversing and enjoying their meals or drinks, kids might get bored and annoy their parent which hampers their dining experience.

You can counter it by providing entertainment options so that you, kids, parents, everybody is happy. Here are a few kid-friendly supplies you might want to consider:

a) Games at the Table:

Activity mats and drawing boards with crayons are the most popular and inexpensive option to keep kids busy at the table. If you are branding your restaurant as a high-tech one, you might even consider portable tablets or tabletop gaming consoles.

b) Play Areas

Although an expensive investment, building a designated play area in restaurants has become quite popular with kids. Play areas keep your customer’s young kids busy and occupied while they enjoy and bond over meals. However, merely opening a play area is one thing, and maintaining it is a different ball game altogether.

For example, you have to keep additional staff to clean and maintain the play area. More importantly, you must be aware of the liability and responsibility in case of any accidents.

c) Arcade Rooms:

If yours is a restaurant with plenty of teens and elder kids in the neighborhood, you can set up a separate arcade room in your restaurant. Apart from attracting young crowds, the coin-operated arcade games also act as a source of additional income for your restaurant.

6. Create a Safe and Accommodating Space for Small Children

With a designated play area in your restaurant, you can prevent them from getting restless, irritated, and disturbing other guests. However, when designing the play area for kids, their safety should be paramount. Here are a few points to consider in your kids-friendly restaurant layout:

i) Firstly, Avoid slippery floors, and use clear signage to alert the parents.

ii) Ensure that the play area is visible to the parents so that they can monitor their kids.

iii) Ensure to create a fenced and contained play area.

iv) Hire additional staff to maintain the safety and hygienic conditions of the play area.

v) Offer padded sheets and covers on the sharp edges of walls, restaurant tables & chairs, etc.

vi) Use protective covers to secure sockets, cables, and other electrical fittings.

7. Marketing to Families with Offers

After you have successfully created an inviting & accommodating space for youngsters, you must market it to families also.  Providing complimentary meals from the kid’s menu is an effective way to attract families on a budget.

Since food items on the kid’s menu are usually less expensive, they might be cost-effective than offering flat discounts or coupons. However, you must ensure that you focus kids under 12 years of age for this offer so that you don’t end up losing profits. Additionally, you can offer discounted prices for weekdays or loyalty programs to attract customers.

Summing it up

From the colorful & healthy menu to restaurant design, from the attentive staff to a dedicated play area, from carefully selected restaurant furniture to marketing offers, making kid-friendly restaurant and attracting families requires you to consider several crucial parameters. However, creating a safe and accommodating space for entertaining kids builds loyalty by enhancing the dining experience and opens up a new source of revenue.

The handy tips mentioned above will make dining at your restaurant a memorable experience rather than a stressful situation. Hopefully, the tips mentioned in this article will help you in capitalizing on new demographic for a profitable restaurant business.