Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We have been using this chair with our kiddo for a year now and it’s clear to me that many of the reviews here lack perspective. I feel like this high chair is overdue for a thorough review that’s not an assemblage of initial impressions from a few weeks of use, but the result of some serious use & abuse. To get it out of the way: we LOVE this chair. The few weaknesses are more than overshadowed by its general awesomeness. When we find out friends are expecting it is the first and only piece of baby gear we give an unsolicited recommendation. Choose whatever stroller you want, but get the Phil&Teds High Chair. I mean really, we have an emotional attachment to it that’s probably irrational, especially since I will enumerate a few weaknesses, but here’s the overarching thing every new parent should keep in mind about high chairs. Your high chair selection matters. A. Lot. This purchase is so much more important than most new parents seem to give credence to. A high chair is a piece of furniture that will live in the center of your kitchen / dining area / hub of your day-to-day life. It gets used 2-5 times a day for *years.* That’s ~2 years per kid of high chair presence in your home and about 3000 instances of use. Before we bought this one our friends would offer us their old high chairs for free. Then we would ask, “did you like that one?” Invariably the answer was “no, we kind of hate it, but it was free.” And then they’d rant on and on about why their high chairs sucked. 3000+ sucky uses is not worth it, having a kid is stressful enough. LIFE IS TOO SHORT FOR CRAPPY HIGH CHAIRS. So, with the preamble out of the way, here are the major reasons we adore this thing: 1. It looks super great. Not too modernist, not too babyish, just right. Most high chairs (e.g. Graco) are just plain ugly, and the super fancy ones are trying too hard to be slick (P&T Highpod, Boon). This is not a trivial matter, hitting the goldilocks point on aesthetics is important for something you leave in your dining room and that your kid does many cute and important things in. Our human lives revolve around food, so make sure your little one (the room itself) looks good when it matters. You will take pictures of your kid with food smeared over their heads, eating 1st birthday cakes, and with family at holiday dinners. You will host friends and they will comment on your place and furniture. You will look at what the addition of a kid has done to your once pleasantly charming place and wonder what the heck happened. This chair’s physical appearance will handle all of these issues brilliantly, you will be the coolest parents because you have this chair. From our own experience, our kid looks good on Instagram (the chair gets comments there too). Our friends are all intensely jealous and mention it many times over. (We were the last in our pack to have kids, so nobody else got to crib our notes… but you can!). Our mother-in-laws think we have fancy taste and hesitate just a little longer before they buy us junk or grab us free things off craigslist/nextdoor. It’s great. 2. It’s incredibly portable. Pick it up by the handle and move it around the house, or pop off the legs and head over to grandma’s house. The portability of the chair ended up being one of those things we only now consider indispensable. Mom likes the chair at one end of the dinner table, Dad likes it off to the side. But no matter, whoever is on duty can have the chair where they want without a second thought. It’s light and has a handle, and it’s strong enough to move when the kid is in the chair too. Want to take it out back for some al fresco dining? No problem, maneuver it through the door (it’s got a wide stance, but it’s reasonably easy) and plop the kid outside. Want to use it in the park? Easy, the prong legs (importantly not wheels or bars) set up easily on any surface from dirt to grass to decks to linoleum. We move the chair from indoors to outdoors constantly. Want the kid to have a snack and be “parked” while you prepare the real dinner? Move the chair to the kitchen and they can watch while you prep (or call in that pizza). But the surprise star is the travel-ability. Sure, it’s way too bulky for plane flights, but we pop off the legs (whole, we don’t halve the legs anymore) and throw it in the car’s trunk for Thanksgiving dinner at Grandma’s house every time. It takes 45 seconds to strike and the same to setup, especially if you ditch the generally useless footrest (which is cute but quite unnecessary). That’s huge stuff. It means the kid is in familiar seating, you’re not stressing out the hosts with your baby seating issues, you know how to manage the setup, and you get to show off your cute and quite handy-dandy high chair. Let the cousins sit in the crappy, free Fischer Price chair while your kid dines in style. We bring the Poppy to our friend’s places pretty regularly. My mom even insists on it, "bring your high chair." 3. It fits in your house. The physical footprint of this chair is very tidy compared to the competition. While the legs have a wide and stable stance, with prong legs it's easy to step over and around them. They can tuck under table edges and stash easily in corners. But most importantly the seat itself is nice and small, which is a huge deal for maneuvering around in a smaller place. So many high chairs just eat up gobs of space, the La-Z-Boy equivalents of high chairs. Having a chair that’s the size of a child’s butt is startlingly handy, you can put the chair in the doorway and still slip past it if you suck in your burgeoning gut. That’s a nice feature around a banquet table too, for those all-important family reunion dinners. 4. It’s absolutely strong, sturdy, useable, and safe… once you stop freaking out. Yes, we too worried about the fussiness and challenges of using a sub-optimal harness setup. That is, until we realized the child is very effectively captured by the tray alone. The tray / post is thoroughly sufficient to hold your child securely in place. When augmented with the backup of the lap belt your child is not going to fall out of this thing. Our child is as squirmy as any (though larger than average) and we really stopped worrying about using the shoulder harness within about a month. It just became clear that they’re not all that necessary, the equivalent of a comfort blanket for parents. What do you need a 5 point harness for, do you race your high chairs? 5. It’s dead simple. Once you tell the babysitter where the tray button is the rest is foolproof. With the shoulder harness straps finally out of the way there is a very standard lap belt using simple clips, and a single tray button. I dunno why some people find the tray release button hard to use, maybe the manufacturing isn’t very consistent, but ours has given us no trouble at all. One click on, one click off. Simple. We only really appreciate this feature when we borrow a “standard” high chair at friend’s houses. Those big trays with their clever clip-on mechanisms that slide just are not worth the frustration. The Phil & Teds has a 3 minute learning curve, and then its operation is just mindlessly easy. So here are the few cons, all of which are more than made up for by the stellar pros. A. The tray (stem) is hard to set down on a table. While the single stem design is easy to remove, it is tricky to put down any place but on the chair’s stem itself. This is made even worse by the cute little blobject cut at the bottom of the tray, eliminating even a semblance of a stable, flat surface. This is easily our standard daily annoyance. With care and practice you can balance a food covered the tray on the stem, even while managing a toddler yelling and signing “all done” whilst trying desperate to squirm out of the chair, now covered in sprayed bits of rice and sauces. But it’s unnecessarily hard and many times we just accept that the table will need to be cleaned up too (or it becomes a quick effort in teamwork, if the 2-adult option is available). We have gotten pretty good at dealing with the temporary tray storage issue, but it’s certainly the most glaring weak spot in daily operation. B. The tray sits in one place only, no adjustment possible. In practice this doesn’t bother us much. Because it does not snug up against your child there are a couple of results: - Food and utensils WILL drop into their laps and beyond. - At some point a knee will pop up as they sit in power poses to show you who is boss. - You cannot push them back against the chair and pin them securely in place (if you wanted to). - You may loosen the lap belt so it’s flush with the tray, as we did, so they can reach the food easily. That again means the belts will not be tightened to carseat levels (so make sure you DO NOT drive with your kid strapped into the high chair). C. The inner chair plastic traps bits of highly-wayward food. How on earth food bits get down into the strap holes is testament to the persistent and aggressive messiness of small children. Unfortunately it does happen, perhaps exacerbated by the inevitable tray gap, and the food will get into the plastic undercarriage of the chair. P&T built the chair with many, many strengthening ribs (burly!) that do an astonishing job of making deep-cleaning nearly impossible (gnarly!). I keep threatening to fill the gaps in with expanding foam or caulk or something just to create a smooth surface *under* the seat, just to ensure the whole kit and kaboodle can be easily cleaned. D. The dishwasher readiness has been oversold. The EPS foam is baby-butt grippy, seems comfy, and looks nice, but it can grab onto bits of food easily. But resist the temptation to put it in the dishwasher! Because it’s a thermoforming material any high-temperature wash will allow the foam to deform making it fit poorly on the chair (unless you reform it yet again, ask me how I know). This is also why, as another reviewer noted, the dishwasher racks can locally “dent” the foam where the heated hard-points of the washer trays locally re-form the foam. Also, the tray’s stem makes the tray itself quite bulky in the washer and it sometimes comes out with a pool of water in the stem. Not great, so we only powerwash the tray when it really needs it. E. The setup *feels* flimsy. The legs wobble, the tray flexes, the snaps seem fussy… it does not feel as if it's built like a tank. But, as noted before, after a year of use I’m convinced this thing is bomber. Don’t be put off by the sensation of it at first, this one will go the distance. CONCLUSION: Buy this chair, be the envy of your friends. Appreciate its coolness, its ease of use, and its portability. Let go of your new parent anxieties and the desire to immobilize your kid with organic, free-trade, 11-point memory foam safety harnesses. Deal with the little messes that arrive in daily life, and do it in style. Buy a high chair you too will irrationally love and take with you everywhere. Make each of those 3000 high chair uses a little bit delightful and you won’t regret a moment of it. 4.7/5 stars UPDATE: 5 years in and we're still super happy with this purchase. When kid #1 grew out of the chair we used it in tiny-chair mode for a while. It worked OK, but our 3-year old wasn't especially interesting in just sitting. He's not really the type to settle into his chair with a pipe and the newspaper after a long day. It's still cute, though. It's now back in action with baby #2. Microdude Mk II is is way more physically aggressive, well over 99th percentile in size, and we *still* don't strap the kid in. The tray alone is still sufficient for safe baby storage. The tray is showing mild signs of wear and tear, a few dents and scratches. But since it's on meal 5000 or so I think it's looking pretty decent. The paint on the legs has gotten pretty scuffed up but it actually patinas fairly gracefully as gray-on-gray. We ended up filling in the internal rib structure with caulk which helped a bit with internal cleanliness (at least, until we decided to lazily embrace the microflora. Now our chair is probiotic! Pretty sure it's healthy, like kombucha or organic compost or whatever). But seriously, there's not a lot of baby items we own that have seen so much use and still get our highest marks. Lovely piece of kit, this chair.