How I Find Gluten Free Restaurants When Traveling
Going on a trip should be exciting. After all, you’ll be experiencing a new city, possibly a new country, and all that comes with it. The sights, the activities, and - most importantly - the food should be something to look forward to.
However, if you’re reading this, you probably know that finding a safe place to eat on a gluten free diet can often be a challenge at best. Going to a new destination can be stressful when you’re leaving the food comfort zone you know so well. You may be asking, what can I eat where whoever I’m traveling with wants to go? Where can I eat at all? What groceries can I expect? These questions come before you even think, what food would you actually enjoy eating at your destination?
With a good amount of planning and research, you too can have an outstanding trip full of wonderful gluten free food. It does take more work than someone without dietary needs would face, but a dietary restriction does not mean the end of enjoyable travel.
If you’ve followed me for awhile you know that I spend way too much of my disposable income on travel, and try to find excellent gluten free spots wherever I go. I also recognise that not everyone has an Instagram account with tens of thousands of followers that you can easily put up a question on where to eat in a given destination in your stories, so I’m bringing you the tools I use to find gluten free bakeries, restaurants, and groceries around the world in just about any place I go. There are simply too many restaurants in the world to keep track of all of them at once; these are the tools I use to keep current.
As an aside: when your destination does not share your native language, I can’t stress enough the importance of bringing an allergen translation card along for your journey. A card translated by a certified translator can help reduce confusion for waitstaff and the kitchen (I often find waitstaff will bring the card into the kitchen to show chefs directly). My personal favorite is from Equal Eats - this is an affiliate link - of which I’ve used the French and Italian cards on my travels across Europe (note: this is an affiliate link). Another option that I know of comes from Legal Nomads, which you can find here.
Whoever said diamonds are a girls best friend clearly never had an allergen translation card!
Find Me Gluten Free
I’m calling out Find Me Gluten Free as a standalone because I personally find this app so, so helpful. Find Me Gluten Free has a desktop website and mobile app with user-generated reviews of restaurants, bakeries, and some shops around the world. The app has content from users around the world who can enter their own reviews and ratings for restaurants they’ve visited. Think of it as a gluten free-specific Google Maps.
The app shines in a few key ways, in my opinion. First, this is an app for gluten free travelers, by gluten free travelers. They’ve recently launched a local guide program to follow along with your favorite local reviewers in their hometowns. Users can classify themselves as intolerant, celiac, symptomatic celiac, etc, to better provide clarity on the reviewer’s needs. Dedicated gluten free spots are now marked with a green check mark for easier viewing, too.
Lastly, I also love how, on the web, if you search for a city with “find me gluten free”, a list of the top rated restaurants in the city will pop up. Here’s what you find if you search for London.
The only real limitations I’ve found are on the app, you do need to enter a destination city to see local results instead of just scrolling around like Google Maps. The other limitation is that, because it is a user-led app, different people may have different rating schemes they use in their own minds. I’ve seen a few people mark down restaurants for lack of options vs celiac safety, or give five stars to a restaurant that only had a few options on the menu. It’s important to make your own judgements with the reviews you find.
There are free and paid versions of the app, the latter offering additional functionality such as a dedicated fryer filter which may be of interest to some.
ATLY - Gluten Free Eats Map
There is another mapping app that I’ve recently been using, and that’s the Gluten Free Eats map from Atly.
Before I go farther with this, I do want (and, legally, need!) to flag that I previously had a paid partnership to create content on behalf of Atly. Including this write-up on this blog post was not part of my work, and I’m including them on this post because, as I’ve used the app, I’ve come to find it very helpful.
Atly is a mapping app that creates premium maps for different communities, and one map they’ve created is specifically for Gluten Free Eats. You can purchase access to this app after downloading from the Android or iOS App Store. The app has restaurant listings all around the world, and is broken out into four safety ratings: 100% gluten free, celiac safe/accommodating, no gluten ingredients, and unverified listings.
What sets this app apart in my mind - and what makes for a strong selling proposition - is that their content is moderated by a team they employ to verify restaurant listings, keep the map up-to-date, and verify inaccuracies. Part of the reason why I don’t maintain gluten free maps is how much work it takes to maintain these maps. Restaurants open and close new locations all the time, and it is challenging to keep up with these changes, let alone keep up in map form. The information is supported by user reviews and recommendations, too.
The team uses this information from their research and user reviews to categorize restaurants into the aforementioned categories. Listings are categorized by meal type, cuisine, and can be filtered with a “Celiac Safety” for those with strict medical needs. They also maintain menus, websites, and a direct “call restaurant” button from within the app to keep everything in-house and make verifying the results you see on screen easy to do. I’ve been using this app for a few months at the time of writing, and have appreciated having it in my gluten free toolkit.
I’ve seen a few things I would consider inaccurate, though this is almost always on the overcautious side. I’ve seen a restaurant in London that has a totally separate gluten free kitchen marked as “accommodating” versus noted as a gluten free kitchen, and I’ve seen a few newer restaurants not noted by the team. When submitted, the team corrects these quickly.
Facebook groups
I’m going to qualify this with Facebook groups aren’t my favorite place to spend time, I’ll get more into that later. Destination-specific Facebook groups, though, can be a valuable source of information for local, crowdsourced insight into a destination. Some of my favorite Facebook groups for gluten free travel are the Celiac Travel group, Gluten Free in London, Gluten Free Massachusetts, and Gluten Free Bermuda (the places I have ties to). If you search Facebook for the city, state, or country that you’re visiting, followed by gluten free, you’re likely to find a group that meets your needs!
These gluten free Facebook groups are full of people who either live in the place, are regular visitors, or have visited in the past, and are in the group to help crowdsource information that others need about a destination. As helpful as people can be, it’s good etiquitte to contribute by answering questions from others if you’ve had your own answered.
I do want to qualify this heavily - on Facebook groups, the search toolbar is your friend. Many people on bigger groups have already asked for the specific questions you have, and you are able to search through the post history in a group to see what other people have asked. For example, if you’re looking for afternoon tea in London, if you search “afternoon tea London” you will see previous posts that people have made asking similar questions, which can provide you the answers you need.
The magnifying glass icon brings up the search bar, which can give you more immediate answers to your questions.
As a result, some people will not answer questions they’ve already answered one to ten times before. You may also get passive aggressive comments to your post telling you to do this if you ask a common question. Remember to use the search bar before asking your question! The other benefit is that you’ll have a much more immediate answer to the question you’re looking for if it’s already been asked. If you can’t find anything, ask away!
Gluten free bloggers
On more than one occasion, I’ve unironically referred to myself as “Mr Gluten Free Worldwide” (and will continue to do so until Pitbull’s legal team sends me a cease and desist). However, the world is too big and contains too many restaurants for one person to physically keep current with what gluten free spots exist all around it. We can keep lists of the big spots in each city, though we don’t have the local knowledge to know what is opening or closing. That’s where gluten free bloggers can be a huge resource. I generally divide these into local gluten free bloggers and those who occupy the gluten free travel niche.
Local bloggers have the advantage of being on the ground and knowing the ins and outs of the gluten free scene in their city or area. As someone who falls into this category, I can give you a behind the scenes look. I get plenty of DMs and emails each month from new restaurants that are opening, adding gluten free options, or expanding in other ways, and want me to help promote their business. I also have a network of bloggers, content creators, and foodies I regularly talk to about the latest and greatest restaurant openings in London, and with the power of our collective minds our knowledge of the gluten free London restaurant scene is very up to date.
An example of this is if you’re looking to visit London, where I currently live, I’ve got a whole gluten free London guide which you can find here. Someone who is physically on the ground, keeping tabs on the gluten free restaurant scene, can be a valuable resource to know places that others not physically present in the city aren’t able to keep up with. Trip reports from gluten free travellers can be insanely helpful, and I want to specifically shout out another gluten free Matt who runs the website Wheatless Wanderlust for his outstanding city guides for destinations around the world. These are a great starting point for planning a gluten free trip.
There are bloggers all over the world, from London (yours truly!), to France, to New York, to Singapore, and more.
Google/TripAdvisor reviews
Sometimes, desperate times call for desperate measures. I would rank using Google as a gluten free restaurant search tool to be one of those desperate measures, but it can work in a pinch. Here is my workflow:
I open the Google Maps app on my phone, zoom into where I’m looking for, and type in “gluten”. For the restaurants that pop up, check out the reviews for it and search for “gluten”. Often times, people will leave reviews of a restaurant that outline how well they cater to the gluten free diet. As one of the largest reviews platforms in the world, Google Reviews are a decent resource for this. I would suggest, though, that this method is far more helpful for those with intolerances versus allergies or celiac disease, unless you come across a restaurant that advertises its gluten free credentials. I’d always recommend calling a restaurant identified using this method before going to avoid disappointment and ask the questions necessary for you to feel comfortable dining there.
Some options with “Gluten” bolded when searching in Central London
In an even more desperate measure, TripAdvisor sometimes has reviews on restaurant pages where people will note the gluten free credentials of a restaurant. I’ve found this to be rare, though it has worked for me a few times in the past. In my experience, though, there is a section for special diets that may sometimes say “gluten free options”. I’ve found this section to be, at times, hilariously inaccurate, and I would not trust it without added verification.
Local celiac/gluten free associations
Depending on where you are traveling, there may be a local or national celiac disease association that has helpful tips on how to navigate a trip to your destination. The content each celiac association puts out varies, though in my experience, most will offer some degree of help with groceries or restaurants. Some particularly helpful national celiac disease associations exist in Portugal and Italy. The Italian Celiac Associaton (AiC) has an incredibly useful mobile app with a restaurant directory of nationwide - in Italy, of course - restaurants they they have certified to be safe gluten free options.
You can find all sorts of gluten free restaurants on the AiC mobile app like this one - GluFree Bakery in Milan!
Bottom Line
Planning where to eat on vacation takes a little extra work when you’re gluten free. With a bit of time and patience, you too can both create an
What are your preferred resources for
