Radegast and Spritzenhaus Kicking Babies Out At 8pm
Sounds like a good policy to us:
Though Williamsburg beer halls welcome kids — and parents in need of a drink after a hard day of calming tantrums and navigating city streets with strollers — they’re setting strict curfews on the way-underage set. The no-kids-after-8 p.m. policies are designed to help keep evening drinking sane for adults who don’t want to feel they’re imbibing in a preschool.“Radegast and Spritzenhaus have curfews for the babies,” said neighborhood mom Courtney Brett. “It’s great for all of us, because what baby is going to stay up past 8 p.m.?” [...]
Yael Eisele, who often takes her 5-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter to Spritzenhaus on afternoons because “it’s pretty empty, there are big benches and there are always kids there,” said she’d faced resistance from some single bar-goers who claimed her kids were out of place.
“Someone at Spritzenhaus once said to me, ‘I don’t drink my beer in the playground,’” recalled Eisele.
“People go out and relax, and I get it, not everybody wants to have kids around, especially if [the kids] are going crazy.”
The idea of these beer halls has its origin in German beer gardens, I guess. Well, at least they all have German names and serve German beers. Whatever, if you want a genuine German beer experience, accept the kids around. It’s pretty normal to go to a beer garden as a family in Germany. Parents are having one or two beers, talking to other grownups, having fun and the children are playing with each other and will drink one or two lemonades. It’s not about getting totally wasted, just about having a good time. Are parents supposed to lock themselves in their appartments and not having fun anymore?
Yeah, but German kids (and euro-kids in general) are usually much quieter and better behaved than the beastly Americans. When American kids can learn to sit quietly and not run around shrieking, grabbing, kicking, and otherwise ruining everyone else’s time, I will welcome them into the bars. During the day. 7 pm curfew at the very least. You can’t take the parts of Germany that benefit you (kids in bars) without taking the parts that require you to have responsibility (control your shrieking spoiled beast of a child).
7pm
Hmmm … last time I checked I was living in the U.S., no matter how much Williamsburg has become some sort of Eurotrash outpost.