At Saraghina in Bedford-Stuyvesant, an Anteater at the Table NOT MCDONALD'S Kathleen Kernizan with her son, Marcel, and daughter, Kristene, at Saraghina. Saraghina - with its handwritten menu, its battered summer-share furniture, its greenmarket ingredients and its cap-wearing fashion-world owner - has managed to become exactly what it wanted to become when it opened two summers ago: a cool, hassle-free, inexpensive neighborhood restaurant. The neighborhood in this case - Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn - is not exactly a Mecca for restaurants (although there is a fairly new wine bar across the street from Saraghina, at Halsey Street and Lewis Avenue, and a Southern soul food joint a few blocks away). On Saturday nights and Sunday mornings, the rambling dining rooms are filled with Williamsburgers and other L-train-riding arrivistes. But on a quiet Monday, you are likely to find a local family - like the Kernizans - at a casual early dinner. IN THE SEATS Kathleen Kernizan, 41, a self-described "paper pusher" for a well-known but "unnamable corporate entity" (around the dinner table, she plays the role of mom); Marcel Kernizan, the precocious, tie-wearing 7-year-old man of the meal; and Kristene Kernizan, who is 5 and would like everyone to know it. WHY THEY CAME It was one of the Kernizans" monthly restaurant nights, and Ms. Kernizan, who wasn't in the mood for Peaches (the soul food place), vetoed Marcel's first choice, which - nice try, buddy - was McDonald's. "They always want pizza or burgers and fries," Ms. Kernizan said. But at least here they get a chance to learn what real Italian pizza is like. Besides, we're Bed-Stuy people. We support local businesses. Moreover, Ms. Kernizan said, there was plenty of room to spread out at their cluttered corner table. "The kids can color or do schoolwork," she said. I can talk on the phone. At home, they'd be screaming, fighting, climbing all over me. WHAT THEY TALKED ABOUT The next morning's assignments. Kristene, who is in kindergarten at the Leadership Preparatory Ocean Hill Charter School, had to practice writing her sight words, which included the trickily spelled "high" and the seven-letter-long "because." But first, of course, she was going to color another anteater. As for Marcel, in second grade at Excellence Boys Charter School, what does one do with a budding politician who lists his three favorite subjects as gym, recess and field trips? Perhaps Ms. Kernizan was right and the boy was simply too S-M-A-R-T for his own G-O-O-D. Restaurant night is one of those necessary, domestic compromises that keep the wheels from coming off the family. Pizza, in exchange for Marcel's writing homework. "It's Mommy's way," Ms. Kernizan said, "of paying a B-R-I-B-E."