Breaking Out in Chives Picky diners beware: Your serve is on to the whole fake-allergy thing.
(Sue Blanchard)
Betsy Cotton has a certain issue with Italian food. “Every time I eat garlic, I get a bad stomachache and don’t feel well,” she explains.
A few years ago, the Thomas Circle resident went to a Maggiano’s in her hometown of Troy, Mich. “As we were ordering, I expressed to the waitress, ‘You know, do you have anything that’s not that garlicky or has no garlic in it?’ She immediately looked at me, and said ‘Oh, is this an allergy?’ For convenience’s sake, I said yes.”
The fretting waitress rushed back into the kitchen and sent out the chef. He came to the table and explained that there was a lot of garlic on the counters: If it got near her food, would that be OK?
What a bind: If she’d answered yes, Cotton would have all but admitted that she wasn’t actually allergic. If she’d answered that, no garlic could be within an angel hair of her food, she’d have thrown the kitchen into a tumult just to cater to her “allergy.”
For the ingredient-averse, a dinner out can be a horrible experience. If they consume something that torments their taste buds, their meal will be ruined. So they learn to adapt.
They lie.
And while chefs and servers know that particular ingredients are unlikely allergens, they don’t dare call out their patrons—that would be discourteous and unprofessional. They have to take allergy requests seriously. So pretty much anyone can claim to be allergic to anything and, problem solved, the ingredient is removed!
But just because the kitchen staff doesn’t object doesn’t mean they don’t know what’s going on.
“When people fake disease, it’s just like people who fake to get handicap plates,” says Jeff Black of Black Restaurant Group, which owns BlackSalt Fish Market & Restaurant in the Palisades and several other establishments in Maryland. “I view it as the same thing. It’s ethically and morally wrong. There are people that need those parking spots. There are people that have real dietary restrictions.”
Black recalls one woman who came into his Black’s Bar & Kitchen in Bethesda and ordered a crab cake sandwich, which came with mustard on the bun. When the waiter brought the dish out, the diner said she was allergic to mustard and asked if she could just have a plain bun.
Well, explains Black, the crab cake patty also had a grainy mustard in the mix. So the server came out with a menu and offered to take a new order, at which point the woman said, “Oh, I’m not really allergic.”
“All she had to say was ‘I don’t want mustard,’” says Black, who notes that the condiment was mentioned in the menu.
“It’s just discouraging when you have that stuff,” says Black, whose son is diabetic.
His advice: Just be an adult, explain what you want, and his cooks will make adjustments. “Don’t play games. And don’t lie,” he says. “I’m expected as a business owner to have a certain amount of integrity. If I say something is going to be a certain way, it’s going to be a certain way—and you hold me to it. It should cut both ways.”
Regardless, restaurants have to treat any claimed allergies very seriously. Over the summer, I requested an interview with Joe Raffa, head chef at Oyamel, part of Jose Andres’ THINKfoodGROUP. I received this response from company spokesperson Laura Trevino:
“Food allergies are very serious stuff so at THINKfoodGROUP we developed a series of menus to better accommodate our guests with special dietary needs. For us it is simply part of hospitality.”
My request was denied. But Trevino forwarded two of the special menus. One was for the Latin dim sum brunch at Café Atlantico in Penn Quarter. Here’s one dish:
Really? No seafood in the pineapple shavings?
Over at Vidalia, near Dupont Circle, Chef R.J. Cooper sees allergies, fake or real, as just part of the job.
“If I have a guest that walks in the restaurant, I’ll do whatever I can to make that guest happy. Any kind of allergies, any kind of modification,” he says. Cooper says the best thing a patron can do is call beforehand. The more time the kitchen has to prepare, the better it can make adjustments and write up a new menu, often with multiple dishes.
“The strangest allergies I’ve ever heard of, I’ve heard here,” says Cooper. Chicken. Pepper. People who are allergic to onions come to a restaurant named Vidalia.
But Cooper counsels servers to walk customers through their orders, making sure they know what they’re getting. Sometimes Cooper will come out of the kitchen to help.
“You don’t want any miscommunication between the guest and the server and myself,” he says.
Communication can also be difficult for people whose aversions go beyond being finicky to full-blown phobias.
Dupont Circle resident Katie Campbell, 25, was repulsed by citrus for years based on an incident that happened when she was 5 years old. She began choking on an orange—a “nice healthy snack” provided by a friend’s mother—then ran into a bathroom alone to gag.
“It was the middle parts, the white pulpy part in the middle,” that gave her trouble, she says.
For the next 15 or so years, Campbell claimed to be allergic to all citrus fruit.
“I had no problems with the taste, but I just was afraid of them,” she says, later adding she “didn’t mind orange-flavored candy.”
For years growing up, her family rarely ate oranges anyway. “We were more of a banana family,” explains Campbell, who grew up outside of Detroit. Then, during her middle-school years, her father “discovered” mandarin oranges and put them on dinner salad most nights. Time and again, Campbell had to defend her fake allergy.
When she was 22, Campbell attempted citrus again, and decided, meh, it’s not so bad. She says she still doesn’t eat oranges very often because they’re quite messy. But the citrus-shunning chapter of her life is over.
As for the garlic-hating Cotton, she bluffed her way through the Maggiano’s meal. The chef ended up customizing a dish for her: pasta with white wine sauce and “parsley or something. Boring,” recalls Cotton.
These days, Cotton chooses her words more wisely. “I do sometimes say, especially if I’m at Italian restaurants: ‘What has the least garlic in it?’”
During that meal at Maggiano’s, Cotton says she never considered simply admitting the truth. “At that point, I was too ashamed. If I had said it wasn’t a real allergy, they would have hated me,” she says. “But it did teach me not to do that again.”
Nov. 7 - 13, 2008 (Vol. 28, #45)
Comments
12:30 pm
This is simply embarrassing. These two young women, whoever they are, are a scourge on our eating establishments and, truthfully, our society as a whole. The chef who compared them to those that steal handicapped parking spots was right on, and maybe even been too lenient. Imagine, you, a hard working chef, and being told that someone was allergic to something when the actually WERE NOT! You slave away, crafting a delicious and morally upstanding meal, only to be dishonestly rebuffed. Could you steel yourself to make another meal without garlic or citrus? I think not. Truly, these "people" are outlandish, absurd and ethically bankrupt, and unquestionably destroying the moral fabric of our great Christian nation. God save their souls.
2:55 pm
Yeah, it sucks when customers lie, but sometimes chefs/restaurants force people to. Too many chefs decline to make changes or alterations, citing their "vision" of the food. I understand the havoc it can create in the kitchen when people want to entirely rework a dish, but it's not that hard to leave off jalapenos or anchovies, for godssakes. As science has increasingly shown in recent years, not all food tastes the same to all people. It's a biological thing (never mind cultural preferences), so don't foist your preferences on us and we won't lie. And don't even get me started with that crap about leaving salt shakers off the table. I want MY SALT, dammit!! Free the salt shakers!!
6:28 am
Some of us are truly highly allergic to garlic and its cousin(s), such as shallots or scallions. Even regular yellow onions can cause us problems. When I go to any kind of high or low end restaurant I always ask if there is a meal without any of the above. I explain that I am quite allergic and I have never had anyone suspect me of lying. Once, at a hotel for a conference, at a luncheon held by my professional group, I did my spiel and they insisted they could make something without garlic. It had garlic in a way that I couldn't detect it easily (my nose is pretty keen for that). I barely made it home for treatment - and it was likely only garlic powder. Imagine if it was a clove! So, please don't assume all of us are lying. Garlic, sea food and peanuts are among the most common serious allergies out there, surprisingly. Then there's lactose intolerance.... oh, don't let's go there!
3:17 pm
As a mother of someone who is severly allergic to many foods, I would be surprised if the chef couldn't tell the difference between an aversion and an allergy.
It has been my experience that someone with an allergy should be asking detailed questions such from the ingredients to how the item is cooked and what else is cooked on the grill, is the cutting board a fresh, clean one, can it be ensured that fresh cut ingredients are used and not a just a handful from a container of prepped items, etc.
Someone who does not like a particular food should be able to request it not be used and if the chef is not prepared to accomodate, the patron should be prepared to walk out.
For those with severe food allergies, even a smear of the allergen can be enough to bring on a life threatening episode. This is not something to play with. If you cannot or will not accomodate the request, please just speak up so that an informed decision can be made.
10:29 pm
It's exactly this kind of attitude though that has caused chefs/servers to not take my two unusual food allergies seriously and caused me to get both seriously ill and actually require hospitalization quickly. I have an allergy to mushrooms and to bell peppers. I do realize there are many kinds of mushrooms, but I'm not willing to experiment, I've gone into anaphylactic shock due to both, and when it's just juice or contact then I just get ridiculously sick to my stomach for days. Some chefs will just pick out the item after cooking with it, other places when the dish comes out with the item I can't have (after requesting it not be put in my food), the server at some places will just pick the offending item out and bring me a new dish within minutes. I still get sick, and scratch that place off the 'places to go' list when I get better. It's sad that enough people fake allergies so as to cause these problems for those of us with real allergies.
4:27 am
I do think that getting a severe stomach ache after consuming garlic could be considered an allergy of sorts, however a 'friendlier' way to deal with it might be to say 'I love garlic, but garlic hates ME! If the server should ask anything further, simply say he/she really doesn't want to 'go there' in a restaurant. That should be enough said. That being said, any restaurant should be willing to accommodate their guests. My father hated bell peppers. The slightest bit in a dish totally ruined it for him, he could taste ONLY the bell peppers. Still, many times restaurants ignored him when he told them that. Of course, he sent the plate back, and refused to pay for it. He also never went back, and told all of his friends that it was a horrible restaurant they should avoid.
Many restaurants are realising that certain allergies, e.g. to gluten, are becoming far more prevalent. I also know of a friend who told her server that she was allergic to all nuts, including peanuts, and was still served a dish containing nuts. She nearly died, and the restaurant is now out of business. It was all so easily avoidable. If a server isn't trained to recognise the severity of food allergies, it is totally the fault of the restaurant. The chef at that particular restaurant tried to blame it all on the server, saying he didn't tell him about the nut allergy. Still, they lost the case, as was just.
I can see both sides of the story.
12:55 pm
As a former server, I understand how frustrating it can be when someone wants to "create there own meal" from ingredients they see on the menu. If you want a meal you create entirely, eat at home and make it yourself. However, there is a big difference between someone playing chef and a patron asking for an ingredient or two to be left out of a dish. They are the customer, and it should not matter whether they hate the taste of tomatoes or they are allergic. If they don't want tomatoes in their meal and it is possible for the chef to leave that ingredient out (ie- it's not a stuffed tomato or similar dish), then the customer should be accomodated. If the chef believes it "ruins the dish"- so what? They don't have to eat it. But don't lie about being allergic. If the chef is unwilling to oblige your request just because you ask- don't go back. they don't deserve your business.
9:05 am
My brother is allergic to poultry, and this began 30 years ago, before food allergies became (apparently) so widespread. It was always a problem when restaurants would lie and say there was no chicken in their broth or that chicken wasn't cooked in the same fry vat. He was a vegetarian for many years starting in his teens, in part I think because he hated having to explain his problem and because he had too many restaurants lie to him.