Eating: hugely important when you have three teenage boys in your house, which will be the case tomorrow, when Jack finishes his finals and comes home. But what’s kind of cool is that Bay Area teen eating strikes me as maybe a little different from teen eating in other parts of the country. I don’t know this for sure, but our kids seem to be more, well, opinionated about what they eat. They know that apricots eaten in February will suck. They have experienced ice cream that has rosemary in it and have lived to discuss which herbs might have been better paired with chocolate.
Which is why it was so much fun to take William to Flora — a fancy establishment across the street from the Fox Theater in downtown Oakland. First, in his usual confident way, he noted that our waitress appeared to have taken her hair style tips from the Hunger Games (springy and sticking straight out). Then he opined that the menu seemed well distributed among lighter and heavier and interesting and familiar, which seemed like a good idea. He observed that there seemed to be a lot of people my age and not a lot of people his age. I observed that the answer to that was probably located in the prices of the food we were about to consume. And the fact that I have a job and he has an allowance. A pitiful one, as he likes to point out.
And then something brought him up short, which I suppose has to do with the fact that he is fourteen. It was this:
Mom, he said, with some awe. The drinks menu is longer than the food menu. Happy to know that there are still some discoveries for our Bay Area kids to look forward to.
Lillian Hamrick 
That is one cosmopolitan son you have there! He sounds like a complete delight, and how lovely to be going out to eat together – enormously civilised. I think my son just grunted at me over the years between13-15. 🙂 But then he has a goddess as a mother.
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When there is dessert involved, it always seems to go well in our house. xoxo
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