Tell McDonald’s what’s important to you when eating out with your family - £300 voucher to be won! NOW CLOSED!

[EmmaMumsnet]

Whilst eating out with the family can provide a much-needed treat and opportunity to reconnect, it can also entail much compromise in order to ensure that all members are satisfied with the outing. McDonald’s UK is keen to find out what is running through your mind when it comes to making that often tricky dining decision whilst keeping smiles on everyone’s faces.

Here what McDonald’s has to say: “We’re looking at new options for our Happy Meal and invited Mumsnet behind the scenes as we started the food development journey! Our restaurants have changed, options like kiosk ordering and table service make it easier for families to enjoy our food but we want to know what you look for when eating out as a family.”

Whether you are celebrating a special occasion, visiting your favourite family restaurant or simply popping into a local take away, we want to know on what basis you make such decisions. Is it the provision of colouring sheets for the kids, or haute cuisine for the more mature members of the family? Maybe you find it difficult to identify a restaurant with menus capable of pleasing all parties and resort to visiting several locations? Is making sure your children’s meals are well balanced or that the location is family friendly important to you?

Whatever your main considerations are when choosing somewhere to eat out with your family, please share them below and you will be entered into a prize draw for the chance to win a £300 voucher of your choice (from a list).

Thanks and good luck!

MNHQ

Standard Insight T&Cs Apply

Generally I find McDonald's very very well set up for families. Good value with a healthy ish range for children. Clean loos. Quick service. It all works fine. Yesterday I took dd to a Nandos outside our usual area. I was so shocked at the tired decor, shabby cleaning and the food wasn't up to scratch (compared to our local Nandos). So McDonald's keep doing what you're doing. Friendly helpful staff are also appreciated.

McDonald's Happy Meal portions are tiny. DD 10 now has a McChicken sandwich meal with milk.

Clean high chairs with straps that actually contain Houdini babies.
Child sized cutlery if applicable (obv not in mcd's!)
Childrens food not arriving at nuclear temperatures so I have to spend 15mins cooling it down while they wail at me because they can't eat it and my own food goes stone cold.
Kids food to come out ASAP, they take longer to eat than I do, and again I can get them sorted and eating before my own food arrives.
No bloody balloons. They either distract them so they don't concentrate on eating or they burst which ends in tears.

CLEAN TABLES AND HIGHCHAIR. i love mac donald's but i don't love picking a table based on whether it's got greasy finger prints all over it or not.

good choice of healthy options. Clean environment. Helpful and friendly staff.

yes also leave out all the marketing aimed at children. v happy to take the kids for the odd macdonalds, i enjoy t too! we don't need any further pressure thanks. also get rid of the apple and grape bags. yuck. mango and melon and pineapple lives better in a bad 👍🏼

Somewhere where I like the food !

Clean tables, highchaies and toilets.
Not being too crowded (tables close together etc) as my dd can feel overwhelmed.
My dd really likes getting a balloon when she goes to Mc Donald's, and is disappointed when there isn't always one there.

For us, we have to know about allergens and I do like that McDonald’s is very clear on this. It’s a good place to take my milk-allergic child as a treat. I would love to see more of a range of desserts suitable for allergies in restaurants in general, especially milk free which is often hard to find.

Veggie food for kids how hard would it be to offer a quorn nugget option? We don’t eat in McDs because of the v limited choices.

Decent high chairs, enough space between tables, clean tables,

Not over flowing bins when you have to self clear the tables; it's a nightmare trying to sort it on your own with a toddler!

Something to colour/do.

Vegetables!
Little pots of sweet corn (Can be done individually from frozen I am sure)

And cutlery for those who want it.

Mostly, nice friendly staff and good quality food

Decent high chairs, enough tables (for self service restaurants), activities for little ones like colouring (and in decent condition, not a set of used stubby pens which have half run out or unsharpened pencils). Clean toilets, changing area, with enough space to bring in a buggy. Willingness to adapt food or bring out a small plate for Mum to share food with older babies who won't eat a full child's portion. Not closing off the upstairs part of the restaurant when more tables are clearly needed!

Decent highchairs, cleanliness, room for pram to be taken into baby change and a toilet in the baby change (so annoying when you're on your own and can't go to the loo!), clear indication of the amount of salt, fat and sugar in each food item.

Clean tables and high chairs. Table service. Relaxed atmosphere. A child-friendly ethos. Colouring pencils and paper offered. Varied menu choices. SN friendly - my child has swallowing difficulties so needs soft food, and we need to bring our own thickened drinks.

Also changing facilities for older children (ie with SN) in disabled toilet)

More 'side dish' options for Happy Meals. My children don't like chips, they're bored of the rather excessive amount of raw carrots in the carrot bag, and my daughter doesn't like pineapple/watermelon, so she can only eat the apple/grapes when they are available (which appears to be very rare these days). Would love to see a simple salad (crunchy lettuce, cucumber, tomato), even a small portion of rice/pasta.

Otherwise, we enjoy a trip now and again.

Safety - I want to sit in a safe place that doesn't have drunk people or rowdy teenagers.

I wouldn't call McD's eating out but we go once a week after swimming to our local one (pl9). The staff are excellent in there at not allowing any bad behaviour. Swearing and rowdy teens etc are ejected immediately - a non to the manager is all it takes.

What would be important to me when eating out at McDonalds.

No communal tables. I don't want to have to sit with random strangers while we eat.

Getting our order right so my child with special needs and food phobia doesn't go into meltdown. This happens 9 times out of 10 at McDonalds. (He wants bread with cheese in, nothing else. Burger King can manage this every time. McDonalds seem to find it baffling).

Orange fruit shoots instead of only selling purple ones.

It's simple really - clean tables, clean floors, clean toilets with soap and loo roll.
Polite staff and enough time to read the menu before being hassled into ordering.

Plates.

Space, i.e. is there space for buggy to get into the place. I like to be able to have the buggy by the table as she sometimes struggles to sit in highchairs for too long. Highchairs, are they clean, do they either come up to the table properly (so many times they're too low) or have their own tray. Child friendly - i.e. not somewhere really quiet where DD will disturb other diners if she makes a bit of noise!

Clean, nice decor /environment, interesting menu and reasonable prices or special deals.

When the boys were small, what mattered to us was finding a cafe or restaurant that had interesting options for children - we got so sick of going to nice looking places (not expensive, haute cuisine, but places that did cook from scratch for the grownups), and finding a children’s menu of fish fingers and chips, chicken nuggets, burger and chips, and chips and pizza and chips - it was so unimaginative. Why couldn’t they have offered some of the adults meals in small portions for children?

It is as if they think children are never going to want to eat anything remotely interesting - and that just is not the case. Ours loved all sorts of things - everything from nuggets and chips to pizza, pasta, fish, Chinese food, spicy food - ds3 even asked for lobster, in a Dublin pub/restaurant once (when he was about 11) - we said no, because it was too pricy, but the proprietor decided to give it to him anyway (and only charged us for the Irish stew ds3 had chosen instead), and ds3 enjoyed every morsel of it!

Sometimes we would order an adult meal and split it between two of them, but this didn’t work all of the time - ds1 and ds2 didn’t always agree on what they wanted to eat, and once ds3 was old enough to need more than baby food, it didn’t work splitting it three ways.

If we wanted to get burgers for the children, I actually preferred to go to than the sort of cafe with the boring kids menu, because I thought their burgers were nicer.

When eating out with small children, reasonably quick service mattered - no-one wants to wait for ages with bored, hungry children. Things like colouring sheets and pens do help with the wait for food.

Clean high chairs are important, as are clean loos.

Most important is the kids menu when we eat out. Nothing over complicated and fancy we get a babysitter if we want to eat out without J. Things like kids packs with drawing and puzzles are a bonus as we do them as a family plus a nice kids dessert.