Five tips to simplify catering for allergies and intolerances

It sounds obvious but the top restaurants make sure their waiters have a forensic knowledge of the menu. “We have several group-wide standards in place throughout our restaurants, and then we have extra venue-specific standards catering to each diverse style of service and cuisine,” Amanda says. “Each restaurant uses a clear traffic light system signalling which dishes can be amended for allergies and which ingredient might be the culprit.”

All food service businesses should display Allergy and Anaphylaxis Australia’s “The Usual Suspects” poster, which highlights common allergens and instructions for dealing with an allergic reaction.

Brent suggests planning for dietaries as you write new menus, not after. “Chefs need to integrate allergies into their way of thinking,” he says. “Think about the boundaries that are put up and then work within the boundaries rather than the other way around. It really gets your creative juices going!”

Brent says having great systems in the kitchen is everything, especially when it comes to allergies. “If someone has a seafood allergy, that meal would get plated on the opposite side of the kitchen, essentially as far away from the seafood as possible” Brent says. “We’re really cautious about cross contamination because that’s where easy mistakes are made.”

Clear labelling is another must. “We always stick labels on the plate right until it is heading to pass, then we take the label off at the last second,” Brent says. “There are coloured labels that you can buy but we just use kitchen tape and write it on there.”

It’s up to front-of-house staff to make sure the kitchen knows about customer allergies. “The Point of Sale (POS) system is probably one of the most important tools we use to communicate allergy information from front-of-house to back-of-house, as the team in the kitchen don’t have the opportunity to discuss directly with guests,” Amanda says. “We also use visual cues placed on the table so the team can immediately recognise a guest with an allergy.”

A coloured cup or particular table setting can be a handy tool.  “Get creative with what’s already going on the table in front of the guest and make sure all the crew know what each signal means,” Amanda suggests. “Without these [cues] we’d spend too much time verbally alerting all the front-of-house team members who might interact with the table.”

Both Brent and Amanda agree: sometimes it’s okay to say no to requests. “Ultimately, if the dish needs to be amended to the point where it loses the essence of why it was put on the menu, then we encourage our front-of-house team to navigate guests toward other dishes,” Amanda says.

In the past Brent has bent over backwards catering for special diets – “to the point where some of the courses were like lettuce leaves brushed with apple juice” – but now he takes a more business-focused approach. “These days, with the cost of labour, you have to think about the viability of what it means to be hospitable. Is someone coming into your restaurant, taking up the seat and actually costing you more than what they’re spending?” he asks.