photo of Au Fudge – compliments Jessica Biel/Au Fudge
Though she’s built up almost a year of mommy experience, Jessica Biel says going out to eat with a baby is still an anxiety-ridden experience.
The 33-year-old actress, who gave birth to her first child Silas with husband Justin Timberlake in April 2015, dished to E! News about the inspiration behind her new restaurant, Au Fudge.
“Since he’s so little still and I’m still kind of learning how I do it in a very smooth and like elegant way, it’s terrifying,” she told E! News’ Catt Sadler of her trips for food with her young tot. “You get to a place, you want to make sure the diners around you are not being bothered, you’re full of anxiety, you’re trying to go as fast as you can—you don’t enjoy it at all.”
However, she’s quick to note that these are the same anxieties she wishes to quell for new parents at her brand new kid-friendly eatery.
“That is exactly what we want to erase from the feeling of a mom, a dad, a family, a nanny, grandparents bringing their grandkids here. It doesn’t matter. We just want you to feel stress free about it and know that they’re playing with things that are safe, that we don’t use chemicals here, that there’s not just a bunch of plastic everywhere and we’ve really tried to think very thoughtfully about your family because it’s our family, too.”
“When we started talking about this, I didn’t have kids and so when [my friends] would say to me, ‘We need a place where we can go and have great food and feel confident where that food is coming from and a place where my kids have fun. This is missing.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Sure I guess, I’ll come hang out,'” she explained.”I didn’t have any real understanding of how important it would be to find a place and create a space where a family can come and your kid can be happy doing something and you can be really happy doing something else or you can be experiencing it together.”
With her baby boy turning one in just a month, will Au Fudge be the spot of a big birthday bash?
“Honestly we’ve been so busy here—I literally have no idea what we’re doing,” she admitted. “He hasn’t had any sort of sugar like that, so I don’t know. I think I probably gotta start thinking about that…I don’t even know if I have the brain power at the moment to do anything other than just get this thing off the ground.”
Au Fudge officially opens to the public on March 4.
See more photos at Eater.com