good ideas

An Upstate Restaurant Limits Parents to One Drink If They’re Driving

Photo: Westend61/Getty Images

Parenting is sobering in too many ways to count, but here’s one more: A restaurant in upstate New York has instituted a one-drink-only policy for patrons who will be driving home with children.

“We love children,” said Melisa Gravelle, general manager at Peddlers Bar and Bistro in Clifton Park, New York.* “Everybody loves children and children don’t have a voice.” Thus the rule: If you’re an adult driving yourself and a child home, you can have one alcoholic drink, and after that, you’re cut off.

“I could never live with myself knowing that I killed somebody driving,” Gravelle explained to WTEN. “It’s a choice you can avoid.” Understandably, most customers are happy to go along with what seems like a perfectly reasonable policy, but for those customers who protest, it falls to the waitstaff to enforce the policy to disgruntled parents, which goes … about how you’d expect. “They do get berated at tables and some come back very upset,” Gravelle explained, “but the managers go to the table and they explain, we’re not picking on parents, it’s just something that we feel … we can do in order to help.”

“I now have a great granddaughter and I would love to think that her parents could only have one drink and then be able to go and drive,” said one patron. “Why take the chance?” agreed another. (This seems like as good a time as any to suggest that limiting your intake before you drive — even if there are no kids involved — is also a good idea.)

* This post has been edited to show the restaurant is in Clifton Park, not Clifton, New York.

A Restaurant Limits Parents to One Drink If They’re Driving