Lorena Armstrong-Duarte is the mother of two funny, smart, curious boys: Nico, age 12, and Alex, age 11. Like many young kids, the south Minneapolis boys have their fascinations, particularly trains, and tornadoes, and World War II, and asteroids.
Nico and Alex love museums, but visiting one hasn’t always been easy. Nico was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) right before his second birthday, and Alex has since been diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia.
“By 2015, we had already started to understand that things were going to be different, and that accommodations would be needed in everything from school to going to a restaurant,” Armstrong-Duarte says.
Armstrong-Duarte, who has ADHD herself, has spent years navigating the complexities of going out as a parent of two neurodivergent kids—the crowds, the noise, the anxiety around new experiences. She’s even written for Explore Minnesota about sensory-friendly attractions, including sensory-friendly story time at the Wild Rumpus Bookstore in Minneapolis and monthly sensory-friendly Saturdays at St. Paul’s Bell Museum of Natural History.
In recent years, as the number of people diagnosed with autism has climbed and awareness about ASD has increased, sensory-friendly options have expanded.
The Minneapolis Institute of Art offers totes with stress balls, headphones, and fidget spinners; the Walker Art Center hosts customized tours for neurodivergent visitors. Target Field and U.S. Bank Stadium both have sensory suites, and Children’s Theatre Company and the Guthrie Theater have begun staging sensory-friendly performances of popular shows with adjusted sound and lighting.
“I think that institutions are more aware than ever,” Armstrong-Duarte says. “There are more of them that are actively trying to be intentional about providing a theater experience, for example, that is sensory friendly—that isn't as loud or as judgmental.”
But for the Armstrong-Duarte family, one experience can still be a struggle: going out to restaurants.
“A lot of things make restaurants difficult,” Armstrong-Duarte says. New experiences are often challenging for kids with autism, and restaurants can be overwhelming, with loud music, loud people, weird lighting, and crowds. “Neurodivergent people have very strong preferences about what we like and don’t like,” she adds, and at a restaurant you don’t always know that you’re going to like what you get.
This is in addition to all of the other frustrations associated with going out to eat with kids: the rolled eyes from the table next to yours if your kid is being loud, the online rants about how children don’t belong in restaurants. “Part of it is a sensory overwhelm, but part of it is that expectation of behavior, that normative expectation,” Armstrong-Duarte says.
Jillian Nelson, policy director of the Autism Society of Minnesota (AuSM), agrees. Nelson was diagnosed with autism in her early 20s, but her siblings were diagnosed much younger. Growing up, she says, “My family just didn’t go out to eat, because there was no support or understanding.”
Today, Nelson still hears from friends who have autism about the challenges of going out to eat if you’re neurodivergent.
The good news is that there are ways for restaurants to support people with autism, but they’ve been slow to adopt those changes. What can restaurants do to better welcome those with ASD?
A few years ago, Dogwood Coffee Co. worked with a disability advocate to get feedback on the layout of its three Twin Cities cafes. Dogwood’s sales and marketing director, Kayla Scott, explains that the idea was to make sure the shops were as safe and welcoming as possible—not just that they met the bare minimum of wheelchair accessibility, but that they were comfortable to navigate, and that signs were visible, condiments were easy to grab, and bathrooms weren’t awkward to use.
Beyond the layout of Dogwood’s physical spaces, one of the advocate’s accessibility suggestions was to create a social narrative for each of the shops. Social narratives, or short stories that describe events or places with simple, clear phrasing, are a tool that help guide people with ASD through new scenarios before the experience.
“When you enter the building you will see a glass wall art installation to your right and the cafe to your left,” Dogwood’s social narrative for its Northeast location explains. “To get to the register, continue walking past the cafe bar.”
A social narrative like this, with detailed information that’s accessible before visiting, helps neurodivergent folks prepare and have a sense of control. For example, "Someone might want to pick a certain location over a different location based on how stimulating it is,” Scott says.
At Dogwood, the stories have proved helpful for all kinds of people, not just those with autism. It’s totally normal, Scott reasons, to have questions before visiting a new cafe: Are there outlets if I plan to work in the cafe all day? Should I expect to bus my own dishes?
“People are always asking about parking, and that’s a great place to be like, ‘Hey, our St. Paul location actually does have parking, it’s just located across the street,’” she explains. (The coffee shop’s social narratives are how I recently learned that Dogwood’s Northeast cafe, which I’d visited countless times, has spare bike locks if you forget to bring your own.)
“The specialty coffee industry can have this perception of being a little pretentious, and that’s one thing that we’re always actively trying to not have—to break down those walls of people feeling like they can’t ask certain questions,” Scott says.
Given how helpful the social narratives have been, it seems like the kind of thing other coffee shops and restaurants could consider implementing. So has Scott noticed any other places in town adding one to their website?
“Honestly, I haven’t,” she says.
I put the same question to James Norton, who exhaustively chronicles Twin Cities food and drink via his newsletter and website Heavy Table. Norton reads a lot of restaurant websites, and thoroughly.
“I haven't, in fact, noticed restaurants trying to be more accommodating to people with autism and sensory needs,” he says.
Norton notes that, generally speaking, restaurants (and coffee shops, and bars) are actually spending less time crafting a website that answers all of your questions. “I think we're currently swinging away from carefully constructed websites written by human beings and toward restaurants representing themselves with social media postings and websites that are often choked with AI copy and/or AI-created ‘photos,’" he says, adding that, these days, it’s not uncommon for restaurants to forego a website entirely and just use social media.
Putting together a thorough, thoughtful website requires time and skill, or the funds to hire someone with the time and skill to develop one for you. The return on investment for restaurant owners isn't always obvious—Instagram is free, after all. And writing a social narrative, or otherwise making sensory-friendly dining tweaks, takes even more resources.
“Knowing that, and with 500 other urgent things to do, it's understandable that smaller, independent restaurant owners in particular often resort to web presences that are sparse or basically barfed out of an LLM of some sort,” Norton says.
Norton notes that, as someone who edits and maintains a food and drink website, his personal bias is always toward careful writing and well-maintained websites. Yes, it might take a few hours (or a few hundred bucks) to write a social narrative (or have someone write one for you), but in the end, that investment could be worth it.
“When we talk about restaurants and their thin margins, it is all the more reason to talk about accessibility, because if you are leaving people outside the door, you’re leaving money on the table,” says Jillian Nelson at AuSM. “When we don’t make places accessible, then disabled people don’t come. And the reality is, disabled people show up—when it’s accessible.”
“It's a smart long-term bet to make sure you're able to tell your own story in a way that you (and not Facebook) actually control,” Norton adds, “and in a way that's respectful of and inclusive of as many potential customers as possible.”
“One of the challenges when it comes to sensory-friendly anything is that there are not set standards in place of ‘you have to do these three things to be considered sensory-friendly,’” says Gina Brady, Sensory Supports and Training Program Manager at Fraser, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that provides services for those with autism and other disabilities.
Sure, it would be great if every restaurant had a quiet dining room, but that’s probably not realistic for most. Instead, Brady says one of the best things businesses and institutions can do is to list what services and options are or are not available—making it clear what options there are for neurodivergent folks who visit.
Brady notes that while traditional, sit-down dining restaurants may not yet do the best job of catering to people who are neurodivergent, breweries can be a welcoming option. “They’re just kind of more inclusive and relaxed and laid-back in general,” she says. Family-friendly breweries—spots like Venn in Minneapolis and Forgotten Star in Fridley—are especially great for young kids with sensory needs, and Brady recommends Dual Citizen in St. Paul, with whom Fraser has partnered on autism awareness events.
AuSM’s Nelson says restaurants could consider stocking a few sensory kits, like music venues and theaters do, for patrons who are getting overstimulated. If your restaurant does have multiple seating areas, maybe one could have quieter music and less aggressive lighting. And Brady suggests that restaurants which offer reservations could—along with dietary restrictions and questions about whether it’s a special occasion—ask if there are any sensory needs they should be aware of in your dining party.
"I think a lot of times, businesses think it’s going to be this huge endeavor, that every single server’s going to have to know all about autism," Nelson says. "And it really isn’t that hard.”
Nelson says there’s a lingering misconception that disabled people don’t have money or engage in community, when in actuality many members of that community work full-time and love going out to eat or meeting with friends.
“I probably eat out more than the average bear because of a lack of executive function to come home after work and cook,” she laughs.
Something as simple as including a small section in your restaurant’s website (or, sure, a pinned social media post) about options for people with sensory needs can show that the community is welcome in your establishment.
“Even disabled people who don’t need a social narrative are more likely to [visit] a business that demonstrates support for the disability community,” Nelson says.
“As a society, we’ve often thought about accessibility from a necessity standpoint—things like hospitals, and schools, the things people with disabilities need to survive,” she continues. “But I also want us to take a moment and think about the things that bring us joy in being alive … People with disabilities deserve to have accessibility in all the places that make life worth living, not just the places that keep us alive.”
