Sarrah Le Marquand of Australia’s Daily Telegraph has finally called a spade a spade — well, scratch that, the word she actually picked was apartheid: “Once a word associated with the horrors of racial segregation in South Africa, a new form of apartheid has crept into the restaurants and cafés of suburban Australia,” she writes of the scourge of kids in restaurants, or all things. “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.” For everyone’s good, it’s time to embrace a two-restaurant system, separate but presumably equal: one “for the food-seekers with kids in tow,” one “for the food-seekers unencumbered by anyone under the age of 12.” The piece appoints chef Grant Achatz of Alinea as the nascent movement’s de facto leader, who “unashamedly subscribes to this child/child-free apartheid,” apparently just because, last year, he tweeted about a crying baby in the dining room. Alinea partner Nick Kokonas calls it the “worst informed ever” of all the articles that have mentioned the restaurant. [Daily Telegraph via @nickkokonas]
