We’re not in Brighton that long (just a few months now) but I’m still trying to establish the places I like to go on the weekend and in my spare time.
Especially important to me is places to bring a baby in Brighton. My wife and I love to dine out so baby friendly restaurants are very important to us. Not just the chain restaurants that happen to be baby friendly, but nice one-off restaurants that we’d love to visit ourselves who welcome babies and children.
I’m constantly amused by the amount of places that offer crayons and colouring material as soon as they see a baby – it doesn’t seem to matter whether that baby is 2 years old, 2 months or 2 weeks – the crayons always appear!
Another slightly worrying thing is these crayons never seem to have any details of their contents, and whether they are toxic or non-toxic. Did we at some point stop specifying that crayons were non-toxic and can now safely assume that all are non-toxic? Seems like a brave assumption to make.
Also looking out for a baby friendly Brighton website – have yet to find a definitive directory of baby friendly places specifically for Brighton – will keep looking, but if you know of one please let us all know with a comment post.
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Hi there! I launched a new website a few months ago in an attempt to fill the gap you are talking about. I’m not sure if you’ve seen it yet, and if you have, if you’ve found it useful at all? I have two small children, I live in Brighton, and became exhausted from not being able to find out where the baby and child friendly restaurants and other places were in Brighton and Hove. So I decided to do the research myself and put it all in one place.
In terms of baby friendly restaurants, Terre a Terre is pretty good, they even provide free organic Hipp baby food. You make a good point about whether crayons provided in ‘child friendly restaurants’ are non-toxic and I would be happy to investigate this further and annotate my listings accordingly if you would find this information helpful. V-Bites is also very baby friendly. But all the restaurants I’ve listed are child friendly and I’ve tried to add as much info as possible to explain why, for each one.
Brighton has got a tremendous amount to offer in terms of baby friendly venues and activities but traditionally its been difficult to get hold of this information, so I would welcome any feedback!
Hi Shoshana,
Congrats on your new site!
Terre a Terre is lovely, but it’s quite a special place (in terms of quality and also price), so we like to reserve that for the very rare night that we have a babysitter, and enjoy it as a baby free zone!
Look forward to using your website in the coming weeks and months.