Last Updated On November 20th, 2018
High Chairs in Restaurants
Parents might all have the same question before they decide to go out to dinner with their kids: are high chairs required in restaurants? The short answer is that high chairs are not required in restaurants. Restaurants that tend to cater to families will be more likely to have them, of course. Even then, they might run out of high chairs before they will run out of other seating arrangements for the hotel patrons.
However, many restaurants do not have high chairs at all. This can be true for entire chains of restaurants. Many parents have to learn this the hard way. They are told by members of the restaurant staff that the restaurant does not supply high chairs, usually just as everyone has already planned for a nice evening outside. Planning a restaurant outing is no easy task for most parents, making it even more frustrating for a lot of people to cope with the variations in the availability of high chairs. However, parents continue to face issues like these.
The Quality of Restaurant High Chairs
It should be noted that even in the case of a restaurant that does have high chairs, the high chairs are often damaged in some way. An unsettling number of restaurant high chairs remain unclean. Staff members are more likely to wipe off the booths or chairs for the older guests. They tend to ignore high chairs, which do not get used as often.
Even more worryingly, a lot of restaurant high chairs have broken buckles or broken latches. As such, babies and toddlers will be more likely to be immediately threatened as a result. Some parents are reluctant to use restaurant high chairs even when they are available as a result of too many bad experiences.
Parents who do use restaurant high chairs might want to quickly sanitise them first with a disinfecting wipe. It’s also a good idea for parents to test the buckles and latches to make sure that everything is secure. Otherwise, parents are usually better off just finding their own alternatives to the high chairs that the restaurants may or may not provide in the first place.
Bringing High Chairs
Many parents more or less just try to get around the entire problem by bringing their own high chairs. This is certainly a cumbersome solution. Parents already need to bring a bag of supplies for their toddlers and babies when they go out to restaurants or anywhere else. Bringing an entire chair is certainly very inconvenient.
However, there are portable high chairs or the equivalent of portable high chairs, and a lot of parents will use them to their advantage. For a lot of parents, this ultimately provides the best of both worlds. They get a high chair that is safe and tested. They will also be able to control whether or not they have a high chair available. This is certainly not something parents would be able to do otherwise, so it can help. Parents cannot rely on restaurants.