Family-Friendly Event Nights: Kids Menu + Early Dining at Tartan

A Guest Blog by Rachel Donnelly | Food Writer & Mother of Three

I’ll be honest with you — I almost didn’t go.

It was a **Thursday evening *in late October, my youngest had been clingy all day, my middle child had soccer practice that ran twenty minutes over, and the idea of sitting down in an actual restaurant with all three of them felt less like a treat and more like a dare. My husband looked at me across the kitchen counter with that expression that said we could just order pizza again* and honestly, some part of me was ready to agree.

But we had a booking at Tartan. And something — stubbornness, optimism, sheer hunger for an evening that didn’t involve a cardboard box — made me say: we’re going.

That decision turned out to be one of the better ones I’ve made this year.

What Nobody Tells You About Dining Out With Kids

Here’s the truth about taking children to restaurants: the anxiety starts before you even leave the house. You’re already running through the mental checklist — will they have something on the menu that isn’t beige? Will the wait staff look at us like we’ve brought a mild weather event indoors? Will the ambient noise level make a toddler meltdown sound like a thunderclap or quietly absorb it?

These are not irrational concerns. Most parents have a catalogue of dining-out disasters filed away somewhere — the spilled drink that brought three staff members scurrying over with expressions caught between sympathy and panic, the child who announced loudly that the food tasted “like a sock,” the restaurant that seated you next to a romantic anniversary dinner and watched as your four-year-old narrated every single bite of their food in real time.

We’ve all been there. Which is precisely why Tartan’s Family-Friendly Event Nights feel less like a restaurant offering and more like an act of genuine understanding.

Arriving at Tartan on a Thursday Evening

We pulled up at five past five, slightly rumpled and trailing a small argument about who got to press the lift button. The entrance at Tartan is warm in a way that isn’t performative — there’s something about the lighting, the timber detailing, the faint smell of something roasting, that immediately tells your nervous system to stand down.

The host — a tall, quietly cheerful woman who introduced herself as Catriona — crouched down to meet my youngest at eye level. Not in a theatrical, look-how-good-I-am-with-children way. Just naturally. Easily. She asked him his name and whether he liked dragons or dinosaurs better. He said both. She said that was the correct answer.

We were seated within ninety seconds.

The table was set sensibly — no towering glassware waiting to be knocked over, no elaborate centrepiece requiring active children to navigate around it. There were coloured pencils in a small jar. There was a folded activity booklet at each of the children’s place settings, hand-illustrated in warm watercolour tones. This month’s theme was “Scottish Sea Creatures,” and my eldest — who is nine and recently decided she is too old for things — was drawing a hermit crab within four minutes. I took this as a win.

The Kids’ Menu: A Genuine Surprise

I want to spend some time here because it matters. Children’s menus at restaurants are, as a category, almost universally uninspired. They exist as a grudging concession — a brief list of foods that children are assumed to tolerate, produced with as little culinary investment as possible. Chicken nuggets. Plain pasta. Pizza that tastes vaguely of disappointment.

Tartan’s kids’ menu is not that.

It reads like someone sat down and thought seriously about what children actually enjoy eating, what parents actually feel good about ordering for them, and how those two things might overlap more than we typically expect.

My youngest started with the Highland Starter Plate — mini rolls fresh from the oven, soft enough that he didn’t need any help, paired with a carrot hummus that had a gentle sweetness to it and vegetable dippers in star and crescent shapes. He ate every single one. I cannot overstate how significant this is. This is a child who treats most vegetables as a personal insult.

My middle child ordered the Crispy Haddock Fingers, which arrived looking genuinely appetising — properly golden, the fish inside flaking cleanly, served with chunky chips and a small pot of what turned out to be a lightly tangy house sauce that all three children immediately wanted more of. The haddock was Scottish, fresh, and you could taste the difference. It wasn’t dressed up in a way that obscured the fish — it was just good fish, prepared well, made approachable.

My eldest — exercising her prerogative to be slightly more adventurous — went for the Wee Ones Pasta Bake, and this was the dish that genuinely impressed me most as a parent. The menu describes a hidden vegetable sauce, and I went back and forth on whether to mention that to her. I didn’t. She demolished it. The cheddar crust on top had that perfect resistance before giving way, and the sauce underneath was rich enough to feel indulgent while clearly carrying the kind of nutritional content you quietly celebrate.

For dessert, all three shared the Caledonian Pudding Cup — a vanilla crème layered with bramble compote and shortbread crumble — and the table went almost completely silent for the first time all evening. That is my highest possible review.

The Early Dining Window: Why It Changes Everything

This is perhaps the structural detail that deserves the most credit, and one I think doesn’t get talked about enough when people discuss family dining.

Tartan’s **Family Event Nights run from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM**. That window is not arbitrary — it’s engineered around the reality of how children actually function. By 5 PM, they’re hungry in a way that’s genuine and manageable. By 6:30, they’ve eaten and still have reserves of good humour. By 7 PM, they’re winding down naturally, bellies full, genuinely ready to move toward bedtime without the civil war that tends to follow late evening outings.

As a parent, the mental arithmetic of this is immediately obvious: you arrive when they’re at their best, you eat while there’s still a manageable amount of energy in the room, and you leave before the wheels begin to come off. We were in our car, children seatbelted and quiet, by 7:08 PM. My youngest was asleep before we reached our road. My husband and I exchanged a look that was essentially a full conversation.

The kitchen, to their credit, understands what this window requires. Children’s courses arrived quickly — not slamming-plates-down quickly, but intentionally, warmly prompt. There was no lag between the kids being served and having something in front of them. The adult courses then followed at a natural, unhurried pace. The sequencing was thoughtful in a way that usually only happens at restaurants that have genuinely considered the experience of their guests rather than simply their own throughput.

The Monthly Feature: A Reason to Come Back

Halfway through our meal, a member of staff — cheerful, unhurried, clearly comfortable with small people — appeared near the pass and announced that the month’s special feature was beginning: a brief demonstration of how the Caledonian Pudding Cup was assembled, and that any children who wanted to come and help layer their own would be welcome.

All three of mine went. Immediately. As if they had been waiting their entire lives for this opportunity.

What followed was about fifteen minutes of supervised, gentle kitchen theatre — the chef explaining each element in simple terms, encouraging questions, laughing genuinely at the answers. My youngest put the shortbread crumble on top and called it “sand.” The chef said it was the best description she’d ever heard. He glowed.

These monthly features rotate — past events have included a storyteller who narrated Scottish folklore at the tables, a craft session where children designed imaginary restaurant menus, and a simple bread-rolling demonstration. They are not elaborate productions. They don’t need to be. What they provide is a moment of genuine engagement — something to tell a grandparent about on the phone, something that makes the evening feel like more than dinner.

A Word About the Staff

I want to be specific about this because I think “good service” is a phrase that gets flattened into meaninglessness. What I mean when I say the staff at Tartan were exceptional on our Family Night is this:

They treated my children as actual guests. Not as small obstacles attached to paying customers. Not as a logistical challenge to be managed. As people who had come to have dinner and deserved to have a good time.

When my middle child wanted to change his order — after it had already been sent — the server responded with the kind of patience that I know, from professional experience, is genuinely difficult to maintain consistently on a busy service. When my youngest dropped a fork and looked up with that specific expression of horrified guilt small children have, the response was a warm “happens to all of us” and a replacement fork before he’d finished processing the moment.

There was also a quiet, practical competence around our dietary considerations. My eldest has a mild dairy sensitivity, and the team navigated that without fanfare, without making her feel different, and without getting it wrong. In a restaurant context, getting dietary requirements right first time without making the affected guest feel like an inconvenience is a level of skill that many establishments never master.

Who This Evening Is Really For

Here is something I’ve been thinking about since that Thursday night: Tartan’s Family Event Nights are not designed to tolerate children. They are designed to celebrate the full range of what a dining experience can look like.

There’s a philosophy embedded in the structure of these evenings that I find genuinely moving — the idea that a four-year-old encountering properly made fish for the first time, a nine-year-old discovering that vegetables can taste good, a child learning that restaurants are places of warmth and generosity and pleasure — that all of this is worth investing in. That these evenings are laying the groundwork for a lifetime relationship with food and with the ritual of the shared table.

My children talk about restaurants. They have preferences. They have memories attached to meals — birthdays, celebrations, ordinary Tuesday evenings that became special because of where we sat and what we ate. Tartan just gave them another one of those memories. A good one. The kind they’ll carry forward.

The Practical Bits (Because You’ll Want Them)

When: Every Thursday and Saturday, 5:00 PM — 7:00 PM

Booking: Essential — these evenings fill up, often one to two weeks in advance. Book online or by phone.

Kids’ Menu: Available for children 12 and under. Teens are welcome to order from either menu.

Allergen Needs: Discuss at the time of booking and remind your server on arrival. The kitchen handles these with care.

Highchairs & Boosters: Available — request at booking.

Prams: The restaurant is fully accessible, with buggy parking near the entrance.

Birthdays: Let them know in advance and they will mark it for your child.

Noise Policy: Relaxed and genuine. This is a space where children are expected to be present. No one will flinch.

My Honest Verdict

We went back the following Thursday. And the one after that.

My youngest now refers to Tartan as “the dragon restaurant,” for reasons that I suspect relate to that first conversation with Catriona about prehistoric creatures, and which I have never fully investigated because I don’t want to break the spell.

If you are a parent who has quietly grieved the loss of actually enjoyable restaurant evenings since your children arrived — the dinners that used to be relaxed and delicious and felt like a proper event — Tartan’s Family Nights are not a consolation prize. They are the real thing.

You should book a table. Bring everyone.

Yes, including the picky one.

Rachel Donnelly is a freelance food and lifestyle writer based in Edinburgh. She covers dining, travel, and the ongoing project of feeding three opinionated children without losing her mind entirely. This visit was self-funded; all opinions are entirely her own.

Reserve Your Table · Tartan Restaurant Family-Friendly Event Nights · Thursdays & Saturdays · 5:00–7:00 PM Booking essential — tables fill fast