Like many families these days, we find ourselves grabbing lunch or dinner on the go probably more than we should. Since restaurant meals are often loaded with excess fat, calories, and sodium, we try to find places to eat that offer healthy food, or something close to it. Fortunately, two of the places we like to go to offer either free or reduced-price dining for small children, which is great for the wallet!
To be fair, we're not talking about gourmet cuisine at either of these places, but you won't feel like you've polluted your body with icky fast food. The first place is perhaps the most obvious for parents of small children: Fresh Choice. Once there were two Fresh Choices in Marin, but the closure of the Corte Madera location leaves only the Novato one. For those unfamiliar with Fresh Choice, it's a chain of buffet-style restaurants offering what amounts to a massive salad bar, along with various soups, baked goods, baked potatoes, pasta, and desserts. And, being a buffet, it's all-you-can-eat, which makes a lot of people happy. What makes it great for families with children is that kids eat either for free or on a sliding scale that's only a fraction of what adults pay. 2 and under are free, while 3–5 pay only $1.49. There are a ton of kid-friendly things in the salad bar that allow you to put together a pretty good meal, including corn, cottage cheese, olives, cold pasta, broccoli, shredded carrots, and way more than can be listed here. Other things guaranteed to appeal to kids are pasta and the various sauces, macaroni and cheese, and pizza. There's dessert, too, consisting of brownies, fresh fruit, pudding, jello, and a soft-serve ice cream-like substance.
The salads and soups are usually pretty decent fare, with an emphasis on fresh vegetables and a lot of vegetarian, vegan, and low-fat offerings. You can eat in a really healthy manner here, but you can also choose to pile on the blue cheese dressing and eat multiple bowls of creamy clam chowder, too, so it is what you make of it. Things that aren't all that great include bland pastas and doughy, greasy pizza, but then those are probably there to appeal to kids and other people who really won't notice the difference. Did we mention it was all-you-can-eat? Another thing we like is that they are starting to use a lot of local and organic ingredients. They even have little placards showing the farm where a specific ingredient came from.
Fresh Choice is located in the Vintage Oaks shopping center off of Rowland Way in Novato.
The other place we often find ourselves at is the Sonoma Taco Shop in San Rafael. Yes, I know it's not the most authentic taqueria in Marin, but it's relatively inexpensive, and it's child-friendly. Sonoma Taco Shop, as its name implies, offers pretty much your standard taqueria fare with an emphasis on healthy, fresh ingredients. They even have a super-low-fat McDougal menu. The best thing about it, aside from the great salsa bar, is that kids eat for free with each paying adult. The children's menu offers a few choices for little picky eaters including quesadillas, burritos, and more. The children's menu items normally go for around $2–$3. What's not to like (for a child) about rice, grilled chicken, and tortillas? The salsa fresca in their salsa bar seems to be entirely chile-free, so it's good for little ones who can't handle the spicier offerings.
Sonoma Taco Shop has several locations in the North Bay, but this is the only one in Marin. It's located in Northgate I off of Freitas Parkway in the Terra Linda area of San Rafael.
