Most of the major chains (McD's, Wendy's, Burger King, and so on) have 'kids meals,' which are (1) easier and quicker to prepare and (2) come with a nifty toy.
However... there's no real place to play with them. If the restaurant has a playplace, they don't let you take your toys inside. You can't play on the table as you eat, because half the time, the toy relies on some kind of motion, a motion which is not possible when Mom's having salad and Dad's trying to enjoy his McTriple and Little Susie is practicing her persecution complex by looking for any motion from you as teasing or insulting or just being mean.
So, set apart some part of the play area as a 'toy zone'. This toy zone would have cardboard boxes and planks of all sizes and shapes, things that kids to build cityscapes to drive their Looney Tunes cars through and ramps to launch their Sonic The Hedgehog windups off of -- maybe even have kid-friendly music like Radio Disney playing. The cardboard would be fairly cheap and easy to replace, and the kids would have somewhere to play with their brighly colored toys.-- Almafeta, Oct 15 2004 + for the profile-- po, Oct 15 2004 hey did I give you your one and only vote?-- po, Oct 15 2004 Why yes, my single solitary vote came from Po. Thank you!-- Almafeta, Oct 15 2004 its po. lower case po! btw...
salute you back!-- po, Oct 15 2004 toys should be seen and not heard.-- benfrost, Oct 16 2004 I was having a bit of a think about this, about why you, as a bloated chiddler, wouldn't be allowed into the play area with your toys. At first, I thought that it was a liability minimisation ploy (if the kid chokes on the toy while sitting with Mon and Pop, then the kid was under parental supervision at all times) but then I realised that it's probably about cover turnover. To maximise the amount of food they sell, the resturants don't want you to sit in and anything that might encourage that (especially kids playing happily while its parents takes a well earned break) is minimised. So, perhaps fit each free gift toy with a radio sensor and transmitter which signals to the floot fitted electric shock machine when little Tyler has spent longer in playing than it takes to eat a boiger. Zzzzapp!-- calum, Oct 16 2004 Nice idea. As we grow up we usually forget about the unique world we lived in as children. [+]-- Pericles, Oct 16 2004 random, halfbakery