Last year, six of us had lunch in the courtyard at the Salisbury Hotel in Stanmore. Three couples and one two-year-old. I ordered a steak and chips and a Coke, and the Coke was the whole problem, because I was the one driving.
The rest of it you can plan for. There are places in the Inner West that take kids without making a thing of it. There's usually parking if you're willing to walk a block. You can even get through a meal without a meltdown, on a good day, with a bag of distractions and a reasonable nap behind you. What you can't plan around is the moment your friends order a second round and you go back to the soft drink, doing the maths on how long until you're behind the wheel.
The Salisbury is a good example of what works, which is not much: a courtyard with sun in it and enough room that six adults and a toddler don't feel like an imposition. The menu is a pub menu. Nothing on it will surprise you, which is the point, because on those afternoons your attention is going almost entirely on keeping a small person in a chair.
Public House Petersham goes further. It has a real play area, not a corner with a crate of toys in it, and the last time we went there was a kids' menu that cost nothing. Worth confirming when you book, because these things quietly disappear and I'd hate to be the reason you turned up expecting it. Two warnings. The play area has no gate, so a child with running in mind will still have you doing laps. And there's no coffee machine, which means no babycino for them and, more to the point, no coffee for whichever parent didn't sleep.
The Grounds of Alexandria isn't a pub and doesn't belong in a list of them, but we went for Sunday breakfast when our daughter was four months old, two couples and a baby, and it solved a problem most Sunday mornings don't. It has its own car park. That sounds minor until you've circled Alexandria with a screaming infant in the back. The place is busy, but it's big enough that a crying baby registers as weather rather than an event.
Beyond that I'm relying on other people. Four names come up again and again when Inner West parents compare notes, and I haven't been to any of them. Henson Park Hotel in Marrickville has no pokies and a games room instead, which matters more than it sounds, because pubs organised around gaming tend to have less room where children are welcome. The Warren View in Enmore has a large beer garden and, apparently, a kids' menu with more on it than a nugget plate. Golden Barley, also Enmore, has a garden out the back and a separate gluten-free menu, which parents of kids with allergies mention first and everyone else never notices. Camperdown Commons has a small farm attached and enough open space that the noise doesn't bounce around, though it's shut Mondays and Tuesdays.
None of these have a dedicated play area except Public House, and after a while you stop looking for one. What you're actually after is outdoor space where a child can move a few metres without putting an elbow into somebody's glass. Most of them have that.
The other problem showed up when we flew out.
It was under ten kilometres from our house to T1 International, and I assumed that would be the easy part of the trip. It wasn't. Very few operators do child seats at all, and the ones that claim to were hard to get hold of. We booked a taxi and spent the morning genuinely unsure whether a car would arrive. When one did, it was a minibus, because the only way anyone could offer a child seat was to send a vehicle large enough to already have one bolted in. For a trip of under ten kilometres we paid roughly five times what a rideshare would have cost.
Rideshare is cheap and everywhere and you cannot legally put a small child in one without a restraint, and you cannot carry a restraint around with you for the afternoon. So the choice is to drive yourself and stay on soft drinks, or to pay a great deal for a car far larger than you need.
That trip is why BubbaSeat exists. The seat is fitted before the car arrives, which means no oversized vehicle and no wrestling with a base in a car park with a queue forming behind you. For a lunch, you book the trip out and the trip back separately, so nobody is paying for a driver to sit outside while you eat, and you book the return when you know what time you actually want to leave. Which, with children, is never the time you said.
The first ten kilometres cost $50, then it's $3.80 a kilometre. Tolls get calculated before you book and folded into the number on screen, so nothing appears later that wasn't there when you paid. Airport pickups carry another $5.92. That one isn't ours. Sydney Airport charges it to every vehicle that enters the pickup area, and it goes through to them.
I'm not going to tell you to stop driving. Most days I drive. It's the long ones that catch you out, the lunch that was meant to take an hour and is still going at four, and by then you've already ordered the Coke and you're committed.