Eating Out Gluten Free

El Piano, in Grape Lane, York, is the first restaurant in the UK to go 100 per cent vegan and gluten-free. Don’t you think that’s amazing?

Eggs, dairy products, meat, wheat, rye, barley and oats are all now off the menu. The restaurant’s speciality is apparently Thai Thai, a spicy coconut cream with red pepper, baby potatoes, lime leaves, lemon grass and wild rice.

And El Piano is now getting ready to open a brand new sister restaurant in March, in Granada, Spain, which will also be 100 per cent vegan, gluten-free – and also nut-free.

How does falafel, hummus, onion bhaji, corn fritters, mexislaw, millet cous-cous and a gluten free ‘bread’ assortment sound? Perhaps followed by sticky toffee pudding or cheesecake?

Sounds great to me.

El Piano offer cookery classes, too, in York and in Spain. How about Cooking with Children, for adult/child pairs? Or Desserts for Restricted Diets? Both sound good, but perhaps Cooking with Children would be the one for us. We’ll have to be quick, though, because my coeliac daughter is already 12, and the children’s cookery classes only go up to age 12. I suppose she would count as able to cope with an adult cookery class in a few months …

If all that is sounding like good news, you can find El Piano at 15/17 Grape Lane, in York, and find more details and their current menu at their website.

If you’re travelling in the South West of England, and should be anywhere near Exeter, it looks like this place – the Halfway Inn near Sidmouth – would be worth checking out.

They do bed and breakfast and have a gluten free menu for dinner as well as breakfast. And it sounds as if they understand the issues involved – and are prepared to provide substitutions where appropriate.

Also, they are clearly interested in supporting local food producers, which I think is fantastic. Their meat comes from a local butcher who knows where his meat comes from, and it is within 4 miles of his shop (4 miles!); and they also have at least one local ale. And nine different ciders available.

Now, if only this was as near to me as the cows are to the butcher … Exeter is a long long drive from here, but I will bear it in mind for a future trip.

If anyone has visited it, please let us know what it was like – thanks!

Rochelle emailed me to alert me to a rave review of an Italian restaurant in London – Cotto.

This was the review from a contributor to the Delphi forum:

I just wanted to let everyone know about my families amazing experience in London this week. We stopped into a Restaurant named COTTO to have lunch the day we arrived. The owner has Celiac disease and is a true gentleman. He personally cooked the best GF Brick oven pizza we have every had. It was as good as if not better than the pizza I had pre Celiac in NYC Pizza places. He also made us great pasta and chicken dishes completely GF. He takes great pride in his food and his care in cooking GF. This is real old world Italian food in a great little restaurant. I can not say enough good things about the food and the owner ! The Restaurant is only a few blocks from the London Eye /Big Ben ( The Westminster train station ). COTTO 89 Westminster Bridge RD

Rave review, isn’t it? Next time we’re in London, I think we’ll check it out. If you’ve been – please let us know how it was for you.

Thanks for the tip, Rochelle!

I called in this morning at the Starbucks in the Sainsbury’s near us – daughter 2 had been to the orthodontist, and needed something sweet and sticky (yes, I know, not exactly ideal), and whenever we go there we try and pick up a piece of their gluten free fruit cake for daughter 1 (the coeliac).

They no longer stock the gluten free fruit cake!

Anywhere – unilateral Starbucks decision.

I suppose that they thought sales were falling, but if they’d kept the stock levels up, they’d have sold more, as often we would find that they’d sold out before we got there. And obviously, because our options are limited we can’t choose something else instead. Lost sales opportunity, Starbucks.

Daughter 1 is going to be so disappointed. This was the best gluten free fruit cake we’d found (apart from my own homemade fruit cake made using vodka and cranberries, obviously) – and we’ve tried a lot – certainly the best cake available commercially, and was the only reason that we would visit Starbucks in preference to any other coffee house.

They’ve replaced it with something called ‘Summer Orange Cake’, and I was so disappointed for my daughter that I couldn’t bring myself to buy it.

I’m really hoping that this is just a summer aberration, and that normal service will be resumed shortly. They’re still listing the GF fruit cake on their website …