<<Disclaimer: Verify this information before applying it to your situation.>>

Dear Listmates -
I mentioned this briefly in my Applebee's summary, but not everyone will
want to read a summary about Applebee's.

If you are eating at a restaurant that grills the food and has no broiler,
or no way of broiling your food, you cannot be sure that scraping the
grill of wiping it will get rid of gluten.

In fact, wiping it is likely to be
done with a cloth that was used on surfaces that had gluten.  And wiping
or scraping it simply won't get the gluten off, even with a clean cloth or
clean spatula.

A simple solution is to ask the restaurant to prepare your food in a clean
pan or clean skillet, with a clean spatula/tongs/spoon, using plain
olive oil
or pure butter.  If they don't have olive oil and won't use what you bring
(such as a small squirt bottle of olive oil - just use one of those little
travel bottles that you would usually put shampoo in), then ask them to
make it in pure butter, cutting the butter off of the uncut end with a
clean
knife.

Calling ahead of stopping by ahead, to make sure they have a pan or skillet
to make it in, is a good idea.  This won't work for everyone - if you can't
have dairy and they won't let you bring in olive oil, and they don't
have clean
cooking oil where they know exactly what it is (such as soybean oil), it is
best to go somewhere else, rather than take a chance on the grill.

I though this up myself - having them use a clean pan or skillet - and
it has
opened up my options on where I can eat.  I get plain salmon or plain
halibut or orange roughy, a skinless chicken breast, etc.

Hope this helps.
Vicki in Illinois

* Visit the Celiac Web Page at www.enabling.org/ia/celiac/index.html *