INSIDE VOICE, PLEASE

Dan McCauley is getting grief these days -- because he won't kowtow to spoiled brats and their parents.

McCauley's bakery, A Taste of Heaven, is on Chicago's North Side -- or, as the New York Times describes it:

... once an outpost of avant-garde artists and hip gay couples but now a hot real estate market for young professional families shunning the suburbs.

Nice place to open a bakery, eh?

Not really.

McCauley put up a sign saying kids "have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven." That's when things hit the fan. From the Times:

After a dozen years at one site, Mr. McCauley moved A Taste of Heaven six blocks away in May 2004, to a busy corner on Clark Street. But there, he said, teachers and writers seeking afternoon refuge were drowned out not just by children running amok but also by oblivious cellphone chatterers.

Children were climbing the cafe's poles. A couple were blithely reading the newspaper while their daughter lay on the floor blocking the line for coffee. When the family whose children were running across the room to throw themselves against the display cases left after his admonishment, Mr. McCauley recalled, the restaurant erupted in applause.

So he put up the sign. Then things really got ugly.

"The looks I would get when I went in there made me so nervous that I would try to buy the food as fast as I could and get out," said Laura Brauer, 40, who has stopped visiting A Taste of Heaven with her two children. "I think that the mothers who allow their kids to run around and scream, that's wrong, but kids scream and there is nothing you can do about it. What are we supposed to do, not enjoy ourselves at a cafe?"

Yes, that's precisely what you're supposed to do if you're such a weak parent that you say there's "nothing you can do about" your own children screaming inside a business. You're the parent. The kids are not in charge.