How to Play Restaurant–the Best Game, Ever

By Grandma Sandy | February 9, 2022

Almost every kid has played restaurant at some time or other. You set up tables and chairs, your friends come, and you dish out imaginary food. To turn this idea into the best game, ever, requires a little more time, thought, and adult guidance.

Children playing the restaurant game with magazine cut-out food. — “**How is your lunch**” **asks the chef, modestly. “It’s delicious!” says the diner.**

Why this is the Best Game

In this game, kids will enjoy pretend play, but they’ll get a lot more out of it. That’s because you’ll be there to guide and teach them how to:

Welcome guests to develop social skills
Learn to read menu items
Take orders to develop organizational skills
Add up an order to present a bill
Learn equivalents to give change
Behave properly in a restaurant setting

Also, this educational game can be improvised to play with what’s at hand, without expensive extras to buy. Also, it can be played by kids of different ages.

First, Prepare the Menu

One the plate: rigatoni cut out from a magazine illustration, plus open menu. — **One of today’s specials, plated and served.**

Here’s what you’ll do together with your child to prepare the menu:

Select magazine images of food or find images online.
Glue images to lightweight cardboard and cut out the shapes, minus the serving dish.
Select the name of your restaurant.
Write out your menu and assign prices–small dollar amounts only.
Type and print out your menu or hand-write it.
Now make a corresponding order form, listing the menu items and prices, so a young child can easily check off the items.

Order form mimics the menu with a check box for items ordered. — **Order form matches the menu offerings with space for the child to check off dishes ordered.**

Next, Organize the Food

All the magazine cut-out food is filed in colorful folders, by category so it's easy to find the right dish for an order. — **File folders on the stovetop help the chef to easily find the food to fulfill an order.**

Make folders for the menu items and label the categories to match your menu. Our folders are just 8 1/2- X 11-inch colored cardstock, folded in half. One for soups, one for main dishes, etc. This teaches kids the value of filing as a method of organization.

Child chef finding the right cut-out food to fill the order. — **Little N goes through the items in the folder, looking for the right cut-out food to fill the order.**

It’s Time to Print Some Money

Menu and play money are needed to play the restaurant game. — **Menus and play money are components needed to play the restaurant game.**

Search “free printable play money” on the Internet. Be sure to print $1, $5, and $10 denominations. That way, you can begin to help a child understand that one $5 bill is the same as five $1 bills, and so forth. You’ll need to have enough cash for the restaurant and the patrons.

Child counts out drinking straw snippets. Each snippet represents $1. — **How to total the check: Little N uses snippets of straw, one piece for each $1, then counts the total bits of straw.**

While older children can add the items ordered to present a check at the end of the meal, little ones can use straw segments to do the addition.

So, for example, if the rigatoni is $3, the child will set out three straw snippets and do the same for every item ordered. To tally the total bill, the child simply counts all the straw pieces.

Now, Set up Your Restaurant

Set up a table and chairs with toy dishes to create the restaurant in a corner of the house. — **The table is set properly for two people. The flowers are fresh, from my dining table.**

We happen to have everything we need to furnish our restaurant. I bought Miss T a compact kitchen set when she was a toddler. We also have a child-size table and three chairs.

In addition, we have:

Toy cups, plates and utensils
Cookware
Kitchen mitt, apron, and chef’s hat

If you don’t have any of these, just improvise. Use an empty upside-down carton for the stove. Use your real dining table or kitchen table. Set the table with paper plates and throwaway utensils–or use real dishes and flatware.

Set the table correctly and with precision so kids can learn to do the same in real life.

How to Play the Game

If four are playing, you can have two teams: Two customers on one team and a waiter and a chef on the other. Since we were playing with three, the chef did double duty as the waiter.

It’s best if you, as the adult, start as the waiter/chef, so the kids can model behavior.

The kids stroll by, poke their head in the door of the restaurant, where you welcome them and tell them about the restaurant…we make everything on the premises, we use organic ingredients…whatever appeals.

Children playing the restaurant game. — **Restaurant guests enjoy lunch. Little N is having pizza, Miss T feeds baby Lucy.**

The Waiter/Chef’s Role

You usher the guests in, get them seated, then bring the menus. Next you offer them water.

You inform them of any specials today, then give the diners a chance to make their selections. Next, you come back and take their order, using the order sheet to check off the items ordered.

Child ordering food, second chiding checking off the order. They're playing the restaurant game, best game for learning and having fun. — **Miss T orders off the menu while Chef N takes the order.**

If you printed your food off the internet, you can print more than one picture of a dish. It you cut images from magazines, most of the food on your menu is likely to be one-of-a-kind. If two people ask for the same thing, you might say the dish was so popular we are almost sold out and we have just one left.

Child returning the menu after ordering. — **“That will be all, thank you.”**

Next, back in the kitchen, you’ll go through the file folders by category to retrieve all the items on the order form. I like to put the food in pots and pans on the stove, pretend to cook, then return with the filled plates and wish my customers bon appétit.

Child in front of the toy stove, playing the restaurant game. — **Little N opens the oven to heat one of the dishes ordered.**

Meanwhile, the patrons eat the food. When they are done, you come by asking if they would like dessert, give them back the menu, take their order, and return with their desserts. Then you add up the order from the order sheet and tell them what they owe. Kids take out their money and using bills of different denominations, pay for their meal.

It's important for adults to be part of the game to guide kids to appropriate behavior. — **Grandma takes a turn as a guest, feeding baby Lucy, while Little N eats a pizza.**

Since we aren’t learning percentages yet, guests should just leave a tip of a few dollars.

Child feeds a doll, learning to model parenting behavior in the best game to teach kids life lessons. — **Little N as the restaurant patron feeds baby Lucy.**

Then we redistribute the money and replay the game, switching roles.

Fancier Food Options

If you want a more realistic experience, you can buy play food. Melissa & Doug has a collection of all sorts of play food, including wooden food held together with velcro so you can “cut” them up with a wooden cleaver, felt food, and wooden grocery items.

Instead of magazine cut-out food, you can use toy food from cooking sets to play restaurant, the best game ever. — **Instead of magazine cut-outs, you can use toy food like the felt sandwich set, stir-fry wooden food, or the sushi on you menu.**

We have quite a number of food sets. Still, prefer the paper cut-out food for this game, since you can have a wider selection.

If you do purchase food sets, one word of advice: I used to keep them in their boxes: the stir-fry veg set with cleaver and velcro chopsticks, the felt sandwich set, the barbecue set; the sushi set. But the packaging took so much space I threw the boxes out. Mistake. Now all the sets are jumbled together in a food bin and it’s hard to sort them out for play.

An Added Bonus

With the pandemic, the children haven’t had as many opportunities to dine out for nearly two years. For a child of five, that’s almost half a lifetime.

So playing restaurant is a reminder of that activity, with hopefully, many more real-life dining out experiences ahead.

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