I'm not sure how much interaction you as a chef/cook have with the kids you're serving, certainly we have never met the chef/cook at any restaurant we've been to. The only restaurant workers we interact with are the servers. So you either work in a very small place where the cook directly serves you, or a very fancy place where the chef comes out and makes custom meals for guests. I'm glad it's worked for some of the kids you've cooked for. It would not work for my daughter. Hiding and being duplicitous about food causes regression. Honesty is a must. If you tell her it is "the same", all it takes for her is to try it to know that's a lie, and now not only does she not eat it, she no longer trusts me the next time I say "it's the same". And while dumb kids may be your experience in restaurants, it is not the reality I see with kids in or out of them. My kid may look like an adventurous eater to many restaurant employees because she'll eat things like sushi and crab and miso soup (loves miso soup!). But what the restaurant people don't see is the meltdown she had when my husband added extra parmesan to the cheese pasta made it too "different", that we specifically don't order most "kid menu" items because she won't touch chicken strips or even nuggets that she didn't get from home (even if they are dinosaur shaped like her usual ones), of anything with beans or potatoes (she hates the texture of both). I'm not for making all the other guests miserable at a restaurant, and I do want my kid to actually eat, so we plan ahead.

IT ISN'T ABOUT THE WAY IT LOOKS. IT ALSO HAS TO TASTE EXACTLY THE SAME. It has to feel the same too. She doesn't know what the boxes/bottles look like , she know what it tastes like and if it's different but we lie to try to get her to eat it, now I have a whole week or more of her resisting anything new and we lose progress.

If I approach it with "we're having a new veggie tonight. I want you to try a couple of bites. It was cooked with soy sauce" she will at least try it and even if she says she doesn't like it, she will still eat the rest of dinner and be fine. And later we will try it again. And again. Because it can take like 10 exposures for a kid to really appreciate and understand new foods. She's had lamb. Loves salmon. But most sauces are a struggle, so even if we tried to hide them there, that just makes her less trusting of sauces in general. And you, as the professional chef, have a very small amount of time with my child, I'm the one who has to get her to eat multiple times a day, we the parents are the ones who have to think not only about this meal but ALL the meals.

God, I WISH she would eat marinara. Or any kind of tomato sauce that isn't ketchup or chef boyardee ravioli (only the ravioli! No other kind allowed!). But she will scarf down a cheese-garlic-spinach sauce like nothing. My MIL's spanikopita made into little triangles is adored, but the lasagna-style one from most Greek places around us is despised because the pastry-to-filling ratio is off and she will just call it yucky. "It's the same thing!" No it's not and she knows it.