I wouldn’t let my dog spoil your dinner… why are your children ruining everyone else’s?

Where do you stand on kids in nice restaurants? If you have them, you’re either wildly in favour – if only to have a break from Giraffe and Wagamama – or entirely against, the better to preserve time spent without anyone asking you for money, snacks, or a wee.

I was struck by the former newsreader Jan Leeming, who went viral on X after saying that a special lunch at The Pig at Bridge Place in Kent was spoiled by screaming children and their “oblivious” parents, and then later by staff who treated her as the problem when she complained.

I walk a similar line with my dog, and the rule I’ve come to is I wouldn’t take her out to dinner, but if she’s allowed, then – sorry, Jan – anything goes at lunch. The same goes for children. If it’s pre-watershed, there’s a good chance of childerbeasts.

In a heroically restrained comment to the Daily Mail, noting that they were there for her husband’s birthday, that The Pig had a children’s menu, and that they had chosen a very late timeslot to avoid disturbing anyone, the children’s mother, Alex Edwards, said: “I would genuinely encourage anyone who feels uncomfortable with my children’s presence to speak to us or to staff at the time, as that would give us the opportunity to address the situation appropriately.” Elegantly done.

The Pig and its myriad branches are one of those tricky hybrids that have popped up in the last 10 years, where everything still costs an arm and a leg, but the wallet mauling is done in a relaxed way. The difficulty is when the wallet mauling gets to a level that those paying feel entitled to do whatever they like. Caring is for lesser mortals. If their children – whether a baby or aged 50 – misbehave, that’s covered by the whopping bill.

That arbiter of modern parenting manners, Mumsnet, is crisp on the matter of kids in smart restaurants: babes in arms are fine; children who can’t sit still, absolutely not. (“High end or not, I stopped taking mine when they were very small as I realised it was just not fun,” a user wrote in one of the many, many threads on the matter. “It’s usually the mum getting stressed whilst everyone else tucks into their meals, relaxed and generally only offering tokenistic help.”)

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Indeed, Rules, London’s oldest restaurant, has changed its own so that children under 10 are banned after 7pm. And while I do worry that a lot of importance is being placed on the 11+ as a sign of being able to hold your own in conversation, I do agree that there are some places you should never take children, no matter their age. My brother and I had hysterics one year when our parents kindly took us to supper, and booked Clos Maggiore in Covent Garden, which regularly tops lists of London’s best restaurants… and the most romantic. I was so glad to share in my parents’ joy by being a gooseberry at their table.

Not that it’s always children who misbehave. I spent a train journey in my twenties rapt, watching a very small blond child composedly eating sushi with chopsticks. Given I myself had only eaten sushi for the first time a year previously, I felt in the presence of a true sophisticate. And, of course, I’ve lost count of the number of elegant dinners out spoiled by cheerfully screeching drunks, honking away or cannonballing into you on the way to the loos, and aged anywhere from 30 to 80.

Manners are something you have to learn. They don’t fall out of nowhere from the magical manners tree: one friend has the very sensible demarcation of “restaurant manners” (polite, civilised, also rolled out for meals with grandparents) and “home” (feral, screeching, barely human, mostly spaghetti).

But they work both ways, too. A relative, bullied into excellence by her girls’ boarding school, would never dream of commenting on someone’s awful behaviour in front of them. I, who wasn’t, absolutely would.

But you pick your battles – and your lunching spots. Wherever you are, rather than leave staff to engage with the screaming party, it’s always better to put on a dazzling smile and do it yourself. Failing that, I never go anywhere without a pair of noise-cancelling headphones and a beta blocker.