Families turn to restaurants for Mother’s Day meals
Mother’s Day is now the most popular holiday of the year for dining out, and area restaurants were ready this year with brunches, buffets, happy hours and dinner specials.
While a thunderstorm raged outside on Sunday, inside the Northland’s Hilton Kansas City Airport hotel, the ballrooms were filled with families celebrating the holiday with a buffet that included a wide variety of items and interactive stations like a bananas Foster bar and children’s cookie decorating table.
One couple at the Hilton said they had started a Mother’s Day tradition of dining out when they were married in 1957 and planned to make a day of it by finishing off the buffet with coffee at Zona Rosa’s Barnes & Noble. Angela Goering’s family has made Mother’s Day an annual outing for about 25 years, and she celebrated with her husband, three children and mother on Sunday.
“We don’t cook on Easter or Mother’s Day,” she said.
Goering liked that the Hilton took reservations so there weren’t long lines. The Hilton had fewer than 500 reservations in 2014 when Mother’s Day fell close to Easter. This year it had more than 900 reservations, and it set up tables between the ballrooms for walk-ins.
According to the National Restaurant Association, nearly half of American consumers responding to a late April survey planned to head out to a restaurant, pick up dinner to take home or call for a delivery. Most of the consumers eating out were expected to pick a casual dining restaurant, and most had made their plans less than a month out.
Affäre, a modern German restaurant in the Crossroads Arts District, offered a three-course Mother’s Day dinner on Saturday but added special dishes to its Sunday brunch menu for the occasion.
Barrel 31 in midtown offered complimentary brunch entrees to mothers, grandmothers and “mother figures.” Jax Fish House & Oyster Bar, just west of the Country Club Plaza, offered a Mother’s Day brunch and then kicked off its new JazzFest Sundays happy hour event, which will feature live jazz music.
To reach Joyce Smith, call 816-234-4692 or send email to jsmith@kcstar.com. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter at JoyceKC
Nearly half of Americans were expected to dine out or get takeout or delivery on Mother’s Day, according to a late April survey by the National Restaurant Association.
▪ Who: 38 percent of Americans planned to dine out and 7 percent planned on getting takeout or delivery, and some planned to do both.
▪ Where: 62 percent of those dining out said they would go to a casual dining restaurant, 25 percent opted for fine dining, 15 percent for buffet-style, 8 percent for fast casual, and 2 percent for quick-service restaurants.
▪ When: Of those dining out, 49 percent planned to go out for dinner, 33 percent planned to go out for lunch, 24 percent for brunch and 8 percent for breakfast. Of those doing takeout or delivery, 53 percent planned to do so for dinner and 43 percent for lunch.
Joyce Smith
This story was originally published May 10, 2015 at 3:58 PM with the headline "Families turn to restaurants for Mother’s Day meals."