Takeout Food

I think most parents of young children will agree with me when I say that sleep is a precious commodity. In fact, I think much of the sleep that I think I've had in the past few years was in fact not sleep at all, but "liquid naps" in the guise of coffee and other caffeinated drinks. Yes, coffee and tea in all their forms keep many of us moving through the day.

Often, it's impractical to drag the kids into a coffee place, or perhaps you want to pick up a latté when they're asleep in their car seats. This is where the amazing phenomenon that is drive-through coffee comes into place. There really aren't too many drive-through coffee joints in Marin, perhaps because we're less into the whole suburban drive-to-Wal-Mart culture, but they can be found at convenient locations throughout the county.

As any regular reader knows, we're always on the prowl for reasonably priced and, above all, good family-friendly restaurants in Marin. One thing that's nearly impossible to find in the North Bay is real barbeque. By "real" I mean genuine Southern-style slow cooked smoke barbeque (AKA "Q"), not (and no offense meant) grilled food, of which there's plenty to be found in the Bay Area. That's grilling, not barbeque. We used to be big fans of the now-defunct Rob's Rib Shack in Sonoma, so when we heard that Frank's Bar-B-Que was going to open in Novato, we got pretty excited.

When you're just too fried to cook dinner but don't want to deal with the whole restaurant experience, that old standby, the rotisserie roasted chicken, is often a great choice, especially since its something that everyone in our family will eat. While most of the supermarket versions are, to put it mildly, unappealing, there are at least two great places in Marin that specialize in tasty roasted birds.