Ten-year-old Camila Yi loves to test her brain power with games.
And, she loves Friday night dinners at Saltgrass Steak House.
"Fried mushrooms are my favorite and the kid's sirloin with extra steak butter," she smiled.
Recently, though, she noticed a couple of things that bothered her.
Number one: She'd memorized all the games on the kid's menu.
"Some of the games are kinda like connect the dots & that's for kindergartners," she said.
And, number two: people on their phones.
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"You wouldn't think you'd be on your phone. You wouldn't imagine that. You would imagine talking with your family, laughing, playing around, eating delicious food," said the fourth grader.
Her solution? New games on the back of the menu and a letter to the owner of the 18 Saltgrass restaurants in Dallas-Fort Worth explaining her idea.
"And I just told myself okay, you gotta do what you want to do. Wrote it down, it my own little style," she said.
In the letter she wrote to Tilman Fertitta, sole owner and CEO of Landry’s Inc., which operates Saltgrass Steak House, she praised the food.
"We think we've eaten there 200 times or more the past few years, We love it," she wrote.
Then, Camila explained the problem.
"I'm writing this to you to consider changing the games on your kids' menu. So I can have a new challenge. My mom suggested I try to come up with sample so I've actually enclosed it for you to see," she said.
"And you have to connect the letters to make a new word, so that was one of the ideas I thought would be fun and get your head thinking," she told us.
"Her voice was heard, and that was the next step, what can we do?," said Robert Brakemeier, regional vice president.
What they did was design a new menu with Camila's suggestions for a new word games.
She told us about the day she got the call.
"And I was like 'Oh.' And, they're like it's from Saltgrass, and I was like, what? and I was so excited," she said.
The menu unveiled last week will go in all 18 Saltgrass locations in Dallas-Fort Worth with credit going to the 10-year-old creator.
"Our team came together and we made one addition, we added her name to the word search," said Brakemeier.
"I didn't even ask or think they would do that but they showed me, and I was like, oh! my name is there," she squealed.
"We love the fact that she put together a solution to something she thought could be improved up and that's something we could all learn from," Brakemeier said.
And, Camila is thrilled to pass on the lessons she learned through conversations at the dinner table.
"It helped me communicate more because normally I'd been on my phone playing games and that's not the best thing to do when you're going out to eat," she said.
