Gluten Free
In the last few years, there has been heightened awareness of food allergies, ingredient sensitivities, and a push to have offerings for those suffering from some type of intolerance. Most of us have heard of lactose intolerant people, or those who suffer from celiac disease, which is an intolerance of gluten. I don’t propose to be an expert, but serve food for a living and can and have done things to try to accommodate those with sensitivities. I grew up with severe allergies, and learned pretty quickly in life the things that would give me trouble. As a child, one bite of cantaloupe would (and still does) result in hives on both arms within a few minutes. I couldn’t tolerate wheat flour, so we had to shop for rice flour or things made from it. Later in life I found olive oil can put me in the hospital. So I guess I have a rather heightened awareness of the problems that can come from eating things that your body doesn’t like. While I think parents bear the primary brunt of the job of finding out what their children should or should not eat, those of us in the restaurant industry need to also make sure that at the least we know what is in our food. If you go some place and they can’t speak to the ingredients, you really need to stop going to that place. It usually means they didn’t make the food in house. In other cases they don’t document their own recipes well. In still other cases they haven’t given their employees the tools to know what ingredients are used in what dishes. We aren’t perfect, and are always looking to do a better job of giving our employees the tools to know all of the ingredients. Thankfully we haven’t changed many of our offerings in 13 years, so we aren’t having to constantly update things. We have recipe books that our staff use to create everything every day. This ensures consistency. We also have ingredient books, which we use to field phone calls from customers and in-store inquiries. While we don’t give out our recipes, we are always happy to share our ingredients with folks with allergies or sensitivities. In the last few years we’ve taken a few more steps to make sure even the newest of employees can know with certainty whether that side dish may give you problems if you have, for instance, a gluten intolerance. On “our” side of the customer line if you were to see the signs for the side dishes you would find we have written out which things have dairy, soy, gluten, etc. so we can answer questions on the fly. At Joe’s Farm Grill Tim, Anthony and their staff have done an excellent job of breaking down each menu item and things that might cause issues for people. They are putting the finishing touches on a really helpful detailed document that we will be putting out on the Grill web site later this year. All this takes us to a discussion of Gluten Free buns. We tested them the other day. I’m told they are about the best gluten free buns available in the Valley. Since we only like to serve the best, I am considering adding them. There are issues to work out. They usually come frozen from the bakery, and I only like to serve bread from our bakery that is baked the same day. They are really expensive. I mean really expensive. All that said, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts about the notion of gluten free buns for our sandwiches here at the BBQ. Worth it? You know of a bakery making great GF stuff? You know of a restaurant doing a great job of working in GF offerings? Are the restaurants you frequent with GF options passing on an upcharge for GF items? What do you think about paying an upcharge? We’d love to hear from you and we look forward to the process of learning as much as we can.
