How to Clear Out a Restaurant

This weekend, Kathy and I took the babies out to brunch with some friends of ours that also have twin babies. Kathy and I used to love eating out in San Francisco and we went out to restaurants all the time before we had kids, but we really haven't eaten out with Leah and Riley much since about three months ago when they stopped sleeping through everything. I was a little apprehensive but sort of curious about how it would go.

It went....poorly.

We went to the worst brunch restaurant in our neighborhood. I'm not saying that out of bitterness because we had a bad meal there this weekend. I mean to say that we consciously decided to go to the worst brunch restaurant in our neighborhood because we knew that there wouldn't be very many people there, meaning that (a) we would definitely be able to get a table for "eight", and (b) there would be fewer people giving us dirty looks when the babies inevitably started crying.

It's a little weird going out with lots of babies, because you can't just ask for a table for four -- you have to be ultra-specific: we are four adults, plus we have two babies who need high chairs, plus we have two babies who are going to sit in their stroller so we need to have space next to the table. Usually when we walk into a restaurant with the twins, there's some initial cooing over the babies by the hostess or the waitress or something, but the restaurant people were clearly having a bad day, because they were having none of that. Perhaps sensing the hostile atmosphere, Leah started whining almost immediately, pretty much right as we got handed the menus.

It was pretty much downhill from there. Leah started crying. Riley started crying. We tried to feed them. We tried to soothe them, we passed them back and forth, we held them, we bounced them on our knee, we lifted them over our head, we did whatever the heck we could think of to calm them down. Each thing we tried would work for about 45 seconds, after which they would start crying again. So that meant that each conversation topic would get cut off after 45 seconds, which led to a whole lot of incomplete conversations. Plus, I discovered that it's hard for my brain to keep a conversation going while I'm simultaneously lifting a baby over my head and making googly-eyed faces.

About two-thirds through the meal, I looked around, and the restaurant that had been about half full when we entered was, and I'm not exaggerating here, completely empty except for us. I mean, everyone was gone. On the one hand, I felt embarrassed that our babies had apparently been so obnoxious that they had driven all the customers away. On the other hand, I felt an undeniable sense of relief that we didn't have to worry about disturbing anybody anymore.

A few minutes later, I found out that the reason why the restaurant was empty is that they had closed the kitchen due to some sort of odd kitchen mishap where the cook cut his finger off or something. I am, of course, glad that our babies had not actually driven away the customers with their screaming, but I'm hoping that the cook's injury didn't have anything to do with Leah's high-pitched screech as the cook was slicing my chicken apple sausage.

So, to summarize. Terrible meal, horrible service, 45-second conversations with crying spells in between, and as a bonus we may have caused a cook to lose a finger and a restaurant to lose a day's worth of business. All in a day's work. Ta-da!