Helpful Restaurant Info from Our Canadian Friend

An increasing number of restaurants are posting both nutritional and ingredient information on their web sites.  Swiss Chalet and St. Huberts restaurants have had allergy guides for over twenty years.  Yet few followed at first.

Restaurants allergy guides sometimes includes cross contamination status along with allergen information on menu choices.  This so far has been mostly true of the big chains and only the top eight to ten allergens.  Other restaurants have ingredient binders or allergen charts at their locations.

Kelsey’s improved and updated its allergy guide on its website, making it easier to follow.  The Keg has an allergy binder, located in their restaurants, but not on line.  When I went to Eastside Mario’s a couple of years ago didn’t know what an allergy policy was.  Now each location has an ingredient binder with allergy information.  Neither The Keg nor Eastside Mario’s has ingredient information on-line, only at their locations.  The great thing about an online allergy guide is that you have an idea about what and if, you can eat somewhere before you visit the restaurant.  The guides also give hints as to how allergy aware and cross contamination aware they are.

The big fast food chains like Wendy’s Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell have also put up on-line allergy information, sometimes including cross contamination policies, but have few choices for people allergic to wheat/gluten or milk.  Taco Bell has no nuts in their restaurants.

If you live in a major centre your more likely to live near a specialty shop that caters to your food allergy.  Toronto Ontario has more than dozen nut free bakeshops to choose from. The Ottawa Ontario area has a few, nut free bakeshops.   More major cities in both Canada and the US have at least one nut free bakeshop.

 New York has almost countless gluten free bakeshops and restaurants.  Specialty shops with dairy and gluten free pizzas have been popping up every where.  Although some main stream pizza places have dairy free vegan options not all are willing or able to deal with cross contamination issues.

Be aware with big chains the Canadian and American allergy guides may be different.  Just because a restaurant has an allergy guide does not mean they have cross contamination protocols, often the allergy guides have a last updated information or a disclaimer. 

We are willing, when traveling to travel at least twenty minutes out of our way to visit an allergy friendly restaurant or bakeshop.  The first time we went to a dairy free bakeshop was amazing, I could actually tell my allergic child she can have anything she wants, even then she hesitated before asking for the vegan nut free brownie, but she soon caught on, and we came home with bags of goodies.

Avoiding Milk Protein http://www.avoidingmilkprotein.com/Restaurants.htm