Chrissy Teigen Had A Blunt Answer About Whether Parents Should Take Kids To Restaurants

Bringing your kids to a restaurant can be a stressful experience for everyone. Will they sit politely in their seat while they wait for their mac and cheese to arrive? Will they avoid the urge to scream at the top of their lungs? Will the restaurant charge you a fee for disruptive kids? It can be a gamble, but Chrissy Teigen thinks it’s just not worth the risk. The Cravings cookbook author and mom of four was recently asked to weigh in on the whole “taking kids to restaurants” dilemma and she didn’t hesitate for a moment with her answer.

During a recent interview on Good Morning America, Teigen and chef David Chang, who both star in the new Freeform series Chrissy & Dave Dine Out, were asked for their “advice” on taking little kids out to a restaurant. “Yeah, don’t,” Teigen very quickly answered with a laugh. “Just don’t.”

“That’s the best answer and it’s true,” Chang chimed in. The restaurateur and founder of the Momofuku restaurant group, who shares sons Hugo, 4, and Gus, 2, with wife Grace, added that if he’s going to take his children out to eat with him, he prefers to go to “a loud restaurant that’s quite busy.”

“It’s counterintuitive, you’d think they wouldn’t like that, but it’s more for the other guests that they’re not going to have a problem,” Chang added.

Teigen said that her and husband John Legend’s “little mush,” 7-month-old son Wren, who was born via surrogate in June 2023, is still pretty chill and “will fall asleep at a restaurant.” Her 1-year-old daughter Esti, however, is a bit rowdier. “She just, ya know... Knives! Glasses! Everything shattering and it’s chaos,” she shared. As for Teigen and Legend’s oldest children, 7-year-old daughter Luna and 5-year-old son Miles, she said they can keep themselves occupied at the table with a phone.

Hey, whatever works to make the family outing as peaceful as possible for everyone. Sometimes a charged-up iPad is necessary and sometimes booking a sitter is the way to go. And as Teigen told Romper in 2021, sometimes kids really just wanna head to the drive-thru. “Our kids are no different than anyone else’s when it comes to their love of chicken nuggets or a good old fashioned Happy Meal,” Teigen said at the time. “As diverse as I thought their palettes would be, nope, they’re just kids.”