Our recent Triumph Dining Gluten-Free Grocery Guide give-away was so popular that we decided to kick off the New Year with a give-away of Triumph Dining’s Essential Gluten-Free Restaurant Guide. While the grocery guide is packed with over 3000 gluten-free foods, the restaurant guide has over 5000 gluten-free restaurants listed. Even so, the best thing about it to me is the fact that it contains extremely important tips you need to know in order to learn how to eat out again. Who cares if a place has a gluten-free menu if they don’t understand what gluten-free means? It’s up to the gluten-free consumer to know how to eat out, whether it be at a restaurant with a gluten-free menu or a place without one.
When someone loves to travel and eating out is their main hobby, a celiac diagnosis can seem like the end of the world. One of the very first things people will tell you is that eating out and travel are not possible for anyone who must follow the gluten-free diet. In fact, you’ll hear it over and over and over again. Five weeks after my diagnosis I found out that there was a gluten-free dinner club where I lived. I felt like I’d won the lottery because at the time there were only five such groups organized on Meetup.com in the entire country. While it’s always going to be risky to dine out gluten-free (assuming you can’t get to one of the few and far between gluten-free restaurants that dot the country), it is absolutely possible.
Though I rarely have to pull out my gluten-free dining cards these days, in the beginning they were a life saver for me. Instead of me risking forgetting something important when speaking to restaurant personnel, the cards did the talking for me. By taking the Mexican cuisine card into the Mexican place near us, I found out they had a corn fryer for corn items and another fryer for wheat products. Now I can have safe tacos and nachos any time I want!
Dining out can be safely done but it takes a lot of work to learn how to do it and the work is actually never ending. For those of us who love dining out and do it often, the work becomes second nature. Because gluten-free dining does involve work, many people either avoid doing it or get sick when they attempt it. People mistakenly walk into a restaurant with a gluten-free menu and assume they just need to order from that menu to receive a gluten-free meal. Wrong. Having a printed gluten-free menu in no way ensures the place that has it really knows what gluten-free means. Sorry to have to tell you that, but it’s absolutely true. Many places with gluten-free menus do a fabulous job of serving safe gluten-free meals and many others do an embarrassingly bad job of it.
Mistakes can be made at places with the best intentions so one must choose where they dine out very carefully and even then, they can’t let their guard down. There are still questions to ask in order to have the best chance of being fed a totally gluten-free meal. Most people want dining out gluten-free to be simple but it simply isn’t. It’s fairly easy to do once you learn what to do, but it’s never going to be as easy for us as it is for someone without any food intolerances.
Everyone should make the best decision for themselves but dining out has always been, and still is, a big part of my life. I’m so glad that I did the work to make it possible for me to continue doing the things I’ve always enjoyed, even though I can’t eat gluten. The Triumph Dining gluten-free restaurant guide offers the tools one needs to dine out gluten-free. It’s a wonderful resource for anyone who misses eating out and wants to figure out how to do it successfully gluten-free.
For your chance to win a copy of The Essential Gluten-free Restaurant Guide, enter a comment below. Special thanks to Triumph Dining for making this give-away for our readers possible. Winner will be posted on Wednesday, January 13th! CONTEST CLOSED.
UPDATE: 1-13-10 / Congratulations to Valerie M. who won the Essential Gluten-Free Restaurant Guide from Triumph Dining!
im taeler im 17 and i have celiac disease, i've know for about a year, and am researching more about ...
I found Heartland pasta at my local WalMart and bought the fusilli. I cooked it up and combined it ...
Dr. Osborne,
Thank you for sharing that. That makes a lot of sense and explains why I can tolerate it ...
Thanks Shirley! If I go to the event, I hope to enter something with pumpkin it it...just haven't worked out ...
Thanks! I would love to recive a copy of the book!
This book sounds great! I just found out I am gluten intolerant 3 months ago, and while cooking at home hasn’t been too difficult, dining out always seems like a chore now. My boyfriend and I are busy people, so we go out to eat more than average, making this change especially difficult. We haven’t done any major travelling since I found out, but I’m really dreading planning meals on our next trip. I am just glad there are resources like this out there!
What a great resource! Pick me! Pick me!
I would love a copy of this book! As a college student I would love to keep a copy of this book with me to help me when my roommates and I want to go out to dinner!
I hope I win!!
Keep your chin up Storie! This diet is overwhelming at first, but you will get the hang of it and be a travelling pro in no time!
What a great giveaway! I would love to win a copy…such a great resource.
This book looks amazing, I would buy a copy regardless of whether I win because there are so many people I know who would love one! I thought my life was over when I couldn’t eat gluten or dairy anymore. Travel and food are indeed my two favourite things, and I’ve been struggling to reconcile that with my disorder for over a year, and keep getting sick. Especially now my mom is in Minnesota and I’ll be joining here again in June [currently in Australia] and I was definitely stressing about what to eat Stateside.
This book is just something everyone in my position needs!!! Brilliant!
Winning one of these books would be wonderful! I love the shopping guide.
Diagnosed with celiac disease in 1990. We’ve come along way since then. Would love to win a copy of this book.
I do really well at restaurants now after 6 1/2 years of being gluten free, but I’d love to have this book as a resource for my support group.
Thanks!
Shirley
I am interested in learning more. I don’t know yet if I have Celiac Disease yet or not. I have a consultation with a new GI doc tomorrow.
I am incredibly sensitive to gluten/seems like everything and this bppk was the only thing I could trust for eating out, but I don’t have the new one yet. Please send me a book! But either w ay ill get the new one, can’t be w/o it!!
Would love a copy! It would be a great resource for going out. It can get discouraging at times and it would be a great book to have to reference when I am out & about.
I have been taking chances with gluten-infested restaurants since my diagnosis in 2005 – it would be FABULOUS to have a quick and easy guide concerning g-free options when eating out!
Woudl be great to recieve a copy of this book. Its great that these days there is a lot more awarenes about the need to be gluten free. I think that this has come from people using a GF diet as a fad or weight loss programme as opposed to a necessary way of life but either way at least the awareness is out there! I recently had my firm’s christmas party and it was difficult for me to choose what to eat off the menu. Before we attended I emailed the restaurant to ask if they could let me know what dishes I could have and they emailed me back with a detailed list of what dishes were gluten free. I was so pleased that they took the need to be GF seriously and had gone to the extra efffort to write up a detailed list. For anyone in the UK the restaurant was “Ask”. Very good food as well!
Thanks.
Annette
Thank you, I would love to win a copy. We don’t eat out often because of having celiac.
I would love to win a copy of this book so my wife and I can enjoy a night out worry free.
I would love to get a copy of this excellent source of information. I am not that great with the computer and to have a hard copy would be so much easier. I have 5 people with celiac including myself in my family, including a grandson, age 9 with type 1 diabetes and he is a future candidate down stream.
What a great book!! This would be a great addition to my growing celiac lifestyle library!! I’m really scared to eat out at restaurants being a fairly newly diagnosed celiac(6 months now) and this guide would help out immensely!!!
The book sounds awesome! My daughter and I have Celiac as well as my two sisters and niece, so we would really benefit from this book. Would love to be the winner!
I would love to win that book, sounds great
I would love to win this book to keep in our group’s library. Thank you for offering this give away.
I was diagnosed with Celiac in Sept of 2007. I have not eaten in a restaurant since. The morning my hubby took me in for my results we had time to spare and stopped in at a favorite of ours for breakfast. A book like this would be great to have! I can use all the info I can get my hands on. Would love to win this! Thanks for the entry opportunity.
Thank you for reminding me that I need to be my own advocate in order to stay gluten free!
I would also love to win the book!!
My oldest grandson, Brennan, age 21, was just today diagnosed. So I went on line to educate myself. This has been a very interesting learning experience. He is in college and is ready to do a semester in Barcelona, Spain, leaving on January 12, 2010. It’s also interesting to me that it seems easier to find the gluten free foods in Europe.
The Essential Gluten-free Restaurant Guide would be a really handy thing to have when travelling. I try to do research ahead of time, but sometimes one has to make decisions on the fly and the guide would make that easier.
This guide would be a great resource for me as a newly diagnosed celiac.
Our bed and breakfast, Barclay Cottage, in Virginia Beach while not a totally gluten-free establishment, will prepare breakfasts that are tailored to our guests’ allergies, celiac condition, etc. Check us out at http://www.barclaycottage.com
Steve
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Sounds like a great resource
Would be great to have book not only for patients but also to help myself as I travel and have to negotiate take out menu’s while on call !
The book sounds like a wonderful resourse to any celiac.
I would love to win a copy of your book. I do pretty well at Wendys . chilli, and a baked potato yum yum.
It is wonderful that there is such a wealth of information available to people about gluten free diets. I would love to have this resource available to add to it.