An Australian newspaper columnist has written the most baffling editorial about children in restaurants I have ever seen, in which she appears to be making a desperate, ill-advised attempt at satire using the term “apartheid.”*
This is beyond nuts. I honestly cannot figure out whether Sarrah le Marquand is trying to use the term “apartheid” (God, I shudder every time I type that), which, again, refers to a brutally inhumane decades-long system of racial segregation and violence, in a positive way. Let’s just dive right in, so you can see what we’re dealing with here:
ONCE a word associated with the horrors of racial segregation in South Africa, a new form of apartheid has crept into the restaurants and cafes of suburban Australia. The divide is as simple as it is absolute: those who sit down for lunch in the company of their crayon-carrying offspring, and those who do not.
That’s her lede. That is literally the thing she starts with. No, Sarrah. Not “once.” Always. That word is always associated with oppression and brutality. If you refer to Spain’s meltdown in the World Cup as a “holocaust of goals,” it doesn’t excuse anything else that came out of your brain just because you tacked “once a word used to refer to the systematic extermination of millions of human lives” onto the beginning of it.
From that opener, it looks like she’s trying to make a hyperbolic, offensively ignorant point about people needing to shut up about kids in restaurants — but one that nevertheless has some recognizable human thought process between Point A and Point WAT. But then it starts to get REALLY bizarre:
If the growing tide of barely concealed grimaces from fellow diners at the arrival of an entourage of pint-sized humans come mealtime is any guide, confining these patrons to separate tables is no longer enough.
They really need their own restaurants. One for the food-seekers with kids in tow, and one for the food-seekers unencumbered by anyone under the age of 12.
How can anyone be expected to enjoy their pan-fried gnocchi, tuna ceviche or salted caramel flan when they suspect there might be a tantrum brewing from the cute-but-ominous looking child two tables away?
Um…wat? Wat? WAT.
OK, let’s just keep pushing and see how deep this rabbit hole goes.
One man who unashamedly subscribes to this child/child-free apartheid is American chef Grant Achatz, who sparked a media firestorm earlier this year after taking to Twitter to complain about a couple who brought their eight-month-old to dinner at his Chicago restaurant.
“I could hear it crying in the kitchen,” he later told Good Morning America of the unwanted diner. “We want people to come and enjoy and experience Alinea for what it is, but we also have to be cognisant of the other 80 people that came in to experience Alinea that night.”
So, basically, the headline on that news story should read: “Restaurateur Thinks About Well-Being of His Customers.”