Chips, fish fingers, pizza … restaurant food for children is depressingly predictable,Are there more adventurous options? I took my four-year-old daughter on a month-long mission to find outWe’re heading out for dinner,Before I tell my four-year-old where we’re going, she has already announced that she’s going to have fish, chips and lots of ketchup,It sounds delicious; a classic,But there’s the irksome feeling that the intrepid impulses of childhood should be met with food that expands palates rather than feeding into the well-trodden path to a beige meal.

My guilt is only slightly assuaged by the ungenerous thought that maybe I can lay some blame at other people’s feet.Namely – as if it hasn’t got enough on its plate already – the hospitality industry.A certainty of fish and chips hasn’t come from nowhere – so often, regardless of the type of restaurant, kids’ menus have the same fodder.There must be good reason.I turn to the internet for answers and come across a Substack from food writer Mallika Basu.

“The restaurant kids’ menu is a divisive piece of paper,” she writes.“A routine homage to chips, fish fingers, burgers and pizzas, they are seat bait to keep little Ginnie and Jonnie happy and still, while you inhale your meal.” Parents will probably know this feeling well: frantically guzzling lunch hoping to finish before your kid starts hanging off a plant.“It’s a chicken and egg situation,” says Basu.“On the one hand, restaurants need to be commercial.

They need to serve what children will eat.” But, “it also reinforces a very boring, bland and beige diet … that will never improve unless they offer something exciting and adventurous to try”.Some eateries are doing things a little differently, pushing at the orthodoxy via various flavours, dips and drizzles, and different ideas about how children should be catered to.So, with my daughter in tow, I embark on a month-long quest to sample a range of kids’ menus, to try to get to the core of what makes a good one.We start with a trip to Domo, a Sardinian restaurant in my home town, Sheffield.

I choose it because it seems to have an unusually wide-ranging kids’ menu.There’s a caprese salad with buffalo mozzarella and heritage tomatoes; three types of pasta – strozzapreti, gnocchetti sardi and mafaldine – with pesto or pomodoro, but also ragu and cacio e pepe; pollo milanese or cod goujons, and a choice of pizza with “any two of the below toppings: spicy salami/ham/peppers/mushrooms/olives/hotdogs/chips”.I read out all the options, wanting to give my daughter free rein for her gustatory travels.She asks for a chip pizza (which has apparently been a thing in Naples since the 1970s).We’re off to a dodgy start, I think, as a pizza loaded with fried potatoes lands in front of her.

I remember something Basu said and cringe: “Every adult knows that children often don’t make the best choices for themselves … Give them a little bit more agency, but also help them make more exciting and adventurous choices,” Next time, I think,I ask my daughter to rate it out of five,She shoves a chip up her nose and giggles by way of answer,We’re meeting friends at a Peak District pub: the Devonshire in Baslow.

There’s the obligatory fish and chips but there’s also cottage pie, mac and cheese, beetroot and red pepper burger,Again, I give my daughter the options, but this time try to make everything that isn’t fish and chips sound magical and exciting,She picks fish and chips,A good kids’ menu, I realise, is only as good as the level of daring your child is willing to muster on any given day,When the mains come, they’re a better-than-average take on children’s menu staples: there’s a slice of lemon that gets sucked on and pea shoots atop the peas, which get ignored.

But as a parent, I appreciate the effort.I ask my daughter what she would rate the lunch out of five.“I don’t know,” she says, adding: “I don’t even know what you mean.” I try to explain but she’s already heading out the door.Back in London and after a day at preschool I take my daughter to a nearby Japanese restaurant, Tonkotsu, which also has branches in Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol and Cardiff.

We are barely in the door when the waitress asks what colour cup she would like her juice in, setting down crayons, stickers and kids’ chopsticks.It’s a great reminder of how the success of children’s dining out goes way beyond the menu.There are three kids’ bento boxes, each involving noodles, broth, greens and protein.My daughter opts for the Yummy Yasai kids’ bento.Edamame is always a hit – there’s something about the process of sucking them out of their pods that makes for instant fun.

The table has colourful sauces to explore and the broth, which has separated out, changes when mixed, sparking interest,“This is a very marvellous soup,” she says,It feels like a refreshing break from watching her use chips as a vehicle for ketchup,It tallies with the wisdom of Thomasina Miers, food writer and co-founder of Mexican street food chain Wahaca,“I found that if I just put a lemon on the table or some vinegar or a sprinkle of something and let my kids do it themselves, they were much more willing to try than if they were being pushed into it,” she says.

I ask my daughter what she would rate her meal.“One hundred forty million a billion,” she says.Does that mean you love it? “Yeah.” Why? “Whichever one I put my finger through, that’s the reason.” She shoves her finger into the noodles.

This has been an unmitigated success,High on success and wanting to ratchet things up, I get wind of an improbable-sounding five-course taster menu for kids, so find myself taking my daughter to Mayfair’s green Michelin-starred Apricity on a Saturday afternoon after dance class,The idea behind it, according to chef-owner Chantelle Nicholson, was about “introducing children’s palates to things they may not have tried before, or to things that they generally don’t think they enjoy in their day-to-day settings”,It is, she says, “a comfortable wee push out of their comfort zone, which kids generally respond really well to”,I wonder if my daughter is a little young, but a waiter reassures me that four-year-olds are fairly regular visitors to the restaurant.

They certainly didn’t bat an eyelid when I arrived, scooter in hand, placing it in the cloakroom among the expensive overcoats.First up is a chickpea doughnut filled with caramelised onion and fava bean (“really good”).The waiter pours a beetroot gazpacho around a beetkraut with sunflower, crispy shallot and nasturtium.My daughter squeals with delight and I think about the role theatre and spectacle can play when it comes to kids’ food – that’s what Pizza Hut’s ice-cream factory, a huge treat for many 90s kids, was about after all.She tries the nasturtium, before warning me solemnly: “Don’t eat the flowers, it’s very spicy.

” She eats a bit of shallot.Does she like it? “When I eat another one that will tell you if I like it or not.” She takes another bite.There is leek agnolotti (“yummy”), leek velouté (“this one’s an old rubber”) and cress (“like a weed.Yum”).

Another unidentified topping is dismissed as “plastic”.“I’ll just throw it in the bin,” she says.The next course involves a rich tapestry of mushrooms, wild garlic and umami XO sauce.“Urgh, yucky, worms,” says my daughter loudly.There’s no filtering kids’ honest reactions, which is, in part, the joy of eating out with them.

She does, in fact, go on to eat, and enjoy, some mushrooms.Her pear-based “pre-dessert” is wolfed down.Ditto her actual dessert(s) – “Chouxnut, caramelised Win-Win white choc, kentish apple, creme fraiche” and “Kentish rhubarb, lemon curd, shortbread, rhubarb granita”.She closes her eyes in a reverie.Before I can stop her, crumbs are licked from the table.

It is a wildly extravagant lunch for anyone, let alone a four-year-old, but it feels exciting to offer her something so expansive, different and challenging,And while I feel a little ashamed that my child now knows the word “pre-dessert”, she was also willing to try ingredients that you wouldn’t find anywhere near a typical kids’ menu,How would she rate it? “Forty one hundred or a billion thousand,” Did she prefer last week’s pizza? “Pizzaaaaa,This.

Pizzaaaaaaa,This,” I’d call that a draw,Speaking to Basu, I’m reminded that some chain restaurants do “a much better job” than others,So we head to Dishoom, a chain of Indian restaurants that smells of sandalwood and has branches in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The children’s menu offers either murgh malai or paneer tikka, served with bombay potatoes and kachumber.“It’s not carb loading, which I think a lot of kids’ menus are,” says Dishoom executive chef Arun Tilak.“It’s a shared meal.If a family is coming, then kids can also have something which everyone else is having.”Tilak believes it speaks to how different cultures see children’s food.

“Asian parents, they don’t even ask for a special kids’ menu because they share the meal … If they’re having a biryani, they might want to add a raita along with it to tone down the spice level a little, but they normally eat the same.”Basu thinks this is the way forward.“The most sensible thing for restaurants to do is just to serve smaller portions of the main adult menu.” It tallies with Miers’ way of thinking, too.“Their taste might be a bit simpler, their appetite might be a bit smaller,” she says.

“But why aren’t you giving them the same type of thing that you want to eat? Because if it tastes good, they’ll eat it,”My daughter’s response offers grist to the mill: while the kids’ paneer tikka is “too spicy”, it is chilli butter-bhutta (“corn on the cob, brushed with butter and grilled over charcoal fire,Finished with chilli, salt and lime”), ordered from the regular menu, that is celebrated as her “favourite thing in the whole restaurant”,With this epiphany in mind, we find ourselves in Al Baladi, a Lebanese restaurant in Acton, west London,We order manouché with zaatar and cheese, balila (boiled chickpeas with garlic, olive oil and lemon) and fattoush to share – all from the “adult” menu.

At home, we used to try not to pander to the idea that kids just eat “kids’ food”, but I realise that things have slipped.For Basu, “if you can be more experimental at home” it will set them up to make more intrepid choices at restaurants.“Yuck to that,” my daughter says, pointing to the chickpeas.“The only thing that I like the best is plain bread.”Oh.

Undeterred, that night we head to an Iranian restaurant called Saffron for her grandad’s birthday,There is no kids’ menu but no matter,Grandad’s jojeh kebab – skewers of diced chicken breast marinated in saffron and lemon juice, served with saffron rice and a tomato salad – is among the most kid-friendly options, according to the waiter, and luckily it’s enormous,I siphon some off on to a smaller plate,“I like the chicken best, and the golden rice.

” She’d give it “a gazillion billion” out of five.We’re in Margate for a night and a tub of cockles has already been imbibed when we head to Sargasso (no kids’ menu) for a fancy birthday lunch.I’m hopeful that we can continue our winning streak.We order chickpeas, spinach and paprika; fried courgettes with anchovies; a tomato salad and John Dory with capers.She eats a single chickpea, a quarter of an anchovy and then sucks on a lemon slice, before deciding lunch is over