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I was making phone calls to restaurants in 'small town Alberta' this 
afternoon, on behalf of my GF-CF daughter who is travelling to Wetaskiwin 
this weekend, for a high school basketball tournament. (If anyone can help 
out with Wetaskiwin your suggestions are welcome).

The first restaurant said "yes, we can accomodate her, we have a few celiacs 
who eat here regularly". So I asked the kitchen manager what he usually 
served to his celiac customers and he suggested the teriyaki chicken, so I 
asked if the teriyaki sauce contained soya sauce, and he replied, "yes, is 
that a problem?"  So I explained why it was a problem and then decided I 
wouldn't want to eat there anyway, without a lot more discussion about 
ingredients, which I feel is too much for my daughter to handle under the 
circumstances.

The next restaurant, although admitting he didn't know much about 
gluten-free, said "tell me what I have to do". He was very accomodating and 
willing to make special orders from scratch to the customers specifications, 
including substituting hash browns (a frozen processed product with multiple 
ingredients) with an order of pan fries prepared from the scoopings of a 
baked potato, in it's own special pan etc. So I took his name and asked him 
which shifts he was working this weekend, and told him if my daughter ended 
up at his restaurant, she would ask for him by name.

And the third restaurant manager said, "I've heard of that (gluten-free) but 
I didn't really know anything about it till this morning when I read an 
article in the newspaper about the mcdonalds fries lawsuit - those fries 
contain both milk and wheat, don't they?"

So I suppose you could say, any publicity is good publicity if it creates 
awareness, even on a superficial level. This person heard about gluten-free 
twice today. Next time someone asks will be the third time, and so on.....

Janice in Alberta. 

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