Showing posts with label children. Show all posts
Showing posts with label children. Show all posts

Thursday, September 03, 2015

"Pub-goers call time on screaming children."

It's easy to be strident when you don't have kids of your own, and so I'd choose to echo these words from the article: "Get them something to do. If the children are happy, the parents are happy.”

It's probably true that amok children and bad parents are in the minority, although unfortunately they can leave a sizable bad taste in everyone's mouth.

As I've always delighted in pointing out, while bulging alcoholic beverage code books in places like Indiana delight in stipulating ways of maintaining a separation between arbitrarily defined age groups, virtually every beer garden I've ever seen in Bavaria has a playground.


Pub-goers call time on screaming children, by Haroon Siddique (The Guardian)

The ambience of the British boozer is being ruined by screaming babies and children whose parents allow them to run riot, according to disgruntled licensees and customers.

Badly behaved, unruly children was the number one bugbear cited in a survey by the compilers of The Good Pub Guide 2016.

Wednesday, May 07, 2014

Children in pubs ... and beer gardens.

My travels have taken me to Central Europe more often than England, and more often than not, there is a fairly clear delineation between "family friendly" and "boozer." Certainly most beer gardens one visits in a place like Bavaria includes the equivalent of a children's playground.

On children in pubs, Katharine Whitehorn (Guardian/Observer)

Historically pubs wouldn't allow children on the premises; now they have family-friendly menus and positively welcome toddlers.

Note that we speak not of 21-year-olds behaving like children. My point simply is that maturity applies to adults as well as children, in the sense of positive reinforcement. If the atmosphere is good, with beer, food, music and fun, why wouldn't we want kids to learn about it, sans the prohibitionist idiocy that inevitably colors any such discussion in the United States?

In 1985, the Augustiner in Salzburg was my first genuine German-style beer garden experience. Although I didn't mention younger children specifically in my recollection, they certainly were there, too, carving up sausages and acting as part of the scene. Why not?

But it was out in the leafy beer garden that I fell in love with a way of life, one experienced for the very first time. At midday, hundreds of beer lovers were seated at tables, shaded by towering chestnut trees, surrounded by stone walls and stucco, virtually all of them drinking malty Marzen-style lager brewed and aged only yards away.
It was entirely self-service, or so I remember. You went back inside for sausages, salads and loaves of crusty bread, and then joined the line for beer. A cashier took Austrian schillings, as plastic was not negotiable and Euros didn’t exist, and handed back a receipt. Upon choosing a liter (33.8 ounces) ceramic mug from the freshly washed public stack, you ritualistically rinsed it in a fountain of cold water, handed it and the receipt over to aproned men who were pouring the deep golden beer from a tap embedded in a wooden barrel, and prepared for nirvana.

Teens drank alongside elderly men. There were playing cards, songs for singing, chicken bones and carts filled with emptied mugs. Strangers shared tables and bought rounds. Worldwide languages were spoken. I ate, drank, used the WC, drank some more, and returned the following two nights to do it again, each time walking 25 minutes back to my lodging, feeling perfectly safe and wishing we could do the same back home.