Few sights are as pleasing to the 9-month-old eye as a near-empty restaurant early on a summer evening. Low sun streams in through the windows, glinting off the glassware. Friendly bus staff, not yet busy, play peekaboo as they polish silverware, and every guest who walks into the room gives you the love you deserve. “Oh, a baby!’’ they say, smiling. Someone hands you a biscuit.
When our son was born last October, my husband convinced the owner of India Quality on Commonwealth Avenue to deliver takeout to us at Brigham and Women’s. Since then, the three of us have shared two or three dozen other restaurant meals. Even at 6 months, Alonzo would easily snooze through a Peking duck dinner at Royal East in Cambridge. And one night at Rendezvous in Central Square, a young couple told us we were “like an advertisement for procreation.’’ We were lingering over creamy lemon-buttermilk pudding (one order apiece, because I couldn’t bring myself to share), the baby smiling in his sleep.
