by Paul Graham
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*1 Buckwheat and garbanzo bean flour would also satisfy me when I discovered them a little later on, though more occasionally than regularly.
*2 Actually, I did once prepare millet for this friend, in the form of millet cakes with Chinese herbs, GF tamari, ginger, and something like a half-dozen eggs to glue the mixture together. This was a recipe I made up on the spot because I had a lot of millet in the house and here was a man who would help me eat it. I pan-fried these millet cakes and flipped them with a surgeon’s lightness of touch because, having no gluten, they wanted to come apart in the pan. He and his wife pronounced them good. I think they were being kind. After this mission, the Experimental Millet Program was forever scrubbed.
*3 I had visited a dermatologist about the sores on my hands a decade before I was diagnosed with celiac disease, and instead of diagnosing me with a condition called dermatitis herpetiformis, a skin reaction to gluten, he misdiagnosed eczema and gave me some topical steroids.
*4 And I know I’m not alone here. A few Christmases ago, my mother decided that she was going to make me a GF stollen, the log-shaped, buttery, fruit-filled bread I had grown up eating every December. She sent me the recipe she was considering. I was immediately wary, because it looked like any other stollen recipe with the exceptions of GF flour and xanthan gum. Not wanting to discourage her, I told her it looked fine, and thus sent her off to her stollen doom. I never saw the stollen. I never even heard about it. And I never asked, because I already knew, before she even took the mixing bowl off the shelf, exactly how that boondoggle would go, though she would have tried it anyway.
Sometime late in February, we were out with friends at our favorite restaurant in town, an American bistro in an old farmhouse that focuses on local, regional, and seasonal ingredients and dishes. I knew this restaurant well. Bec and I had been visiting for over a decade. When we pulled into the parking lot, I expected that my first meal out as a person with celiac disease would be only slightly different from the dozens of other times we had eaten there in ten years. But when we sat down to eat, it was as though for the first time.
I froze when I looked at the menu. What was safe? Was there flour in demi-glace? I knew there wasn’t, or that there shouldn’t be, but how could I be certain? What about beurre blanc? It helps to know gastronomical terminology when you bring an allergy into a restaurant, but I was encountering something different from unfamiliar vocabulary. The idea of getting a meal I didn’t have any control over filled me with anxiety, even fear. I read the menu once, twice, three times, trying to see through the description of the finished dishes back into the process and the ingredients. But a good menu, I knew well, never tells you all of its secrets.
This was strange territory. I felt embarrassed. It’s one of the reasons why newly diagnosed celiacs, according to one survey, dine out 90-percent less after diagnosis than before. The dangers of cross-contamination, and the high probability of a buzzkill even if the meal does go well, combine to upend the very story restaurants exist to create, which is that when a diner walks in, they can be, and for a brief time are, a different person—a little wealthier, more romantic, more worldly. To walk into most restaurants with a severe allergy is to be reminded exactly what type of eater you are, no matter how understanding and flexible the kitchen might be.
Bec leaned over and confirmed the safest options. I noticed, for the first time, that instead of starting with a familiar feeling of expanding possibilities—for years, my approach was always to order dishes I do not have the time, knowledge, equipment, patience, or ingredients to prepare at home—this meal out began with reduction, elimination. By the time I had crossed off the definitely unsafe and the probably unsafe, I was down to two options. When the server arrived, I trotted out my new dietary needs.* At that point I was one of only a few people in town with celiac disease that I knew of. She listened carefully, and kindly offered substitutions that I found to be both a relief and problematic: in changing the dish, I wouldn’t be experiencing the meal the way the chef had designed it. I had come to believe that everything on the plate at a good restaurant was there for a reason, and it bothered me to tinker with it.
The plates came. I ate hesitantly, without much enjoyment, and talked distantly with Bec and our friends. Nothing felt as it should have. Even though I experienced a victory in not getting sick, I wondered how long it would take for me to feel normal in a restaurant again.
Plenty of eaters are in the position I was, of course. Vegetarians, vegans, and those with allergies and special religious practices all approach dining out with varying degrees of caution. They’ve learned the ropes and figured out how to enjoy themselves. But the most sensitive have also come to know something that “normal” eaters do not often have occasion to consider: to have anyone make food for you is an implicit extension of trust. The more serious the consequences, the greater the confidence one puts in the cook. It’s a happy thing for people with allergies that restaurants are offering an increasingly wide range of options and substitutions, and more information on their menus. They recognize the benefits that everyone enjoys when they take sensitivities seriously.
For me, the problem was that I hated having to extend so much trust in the first place. I had learned to love food, and travel, and dining out by doing it, of course, but also by reading books by those who had done more of it than I ever would—mostly because they had more money and time to travel, but also because, in some cases, dining out was different in the eras when they lived and wrote. I had no real gastronomical guides in my family or circle of friends, and so the writings of gourmands like M. F. K. Fisher, Julia Child, Calvin Trillin, Ruth Reichl, and many others loomed large. Reading might be the nerdiest way to become a hedonist, but it worked for me.
The most dramatic and compelling of the eating stories I read and hoped to someday replicate for myself was of a certain type. There came a point in a gourmand’s travels when he arrived exhausted at a hotel or a restaurant, sat down at a table, and said to the waiter or the chef or both, I am in your hands.
That was it. That was how he ordered.
Sometimes he did not even have to say that much; he entered a restaurant, was shown to a table, and then food, lots of it, simply started appearing. This mythological encounter seemed to occur more in Europe, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. Miraculously (or not: they chose their venues carefully), these thoughtful eaters who had not asked for anything specific enjoyed meals from which they could not have asked anything more. I had long wanted to experience an outing like that, but not anymore; having celiac disease makes the idea of getting a meal that way terrifying. Imagine the embarrassment of having to send it all back—without even tasting it first. A prix-fixe menu is also bad news, as is a tasting menu. A short menu is challenging enough, unless the kitchen is flexible.
It wasn’t until after my diagnosis that I realized where the real pleasure of these storied meals existed: it was all about the act of surrender. Give yourself over entirely to the talent and the instincts of the chef, and if the chef delivers, you will be sated in ways you could not have predicted.
This approach worked for the gourmet illuminati because there was nothing they would not eat, nothing they could not eat. Only the “roving gourmand” Jim Harrison, who has written eloquently of having gout, stands apart from the canon’s possession of what appears to be exquisite digestive equipment. Or, maybe they did all have dietary restrictions, and reached for the Rolaids after their feeds, but like elite athletes who play hurt, they soldiered on. In any event, only Harrison’s attitude tends toward “Damn the torpedoes and full-speed ahead. I’ll have the rib-eye and a bottle of Châteauneuf.” It was an act I would have followed if it were possible to do so. Gout and celiac disease are not the same thing.
Nonetheless, it was difficult for me to leave this kind of thinking behind, because I had experienced variations of surrender-and-satiety before visiting restaurants suddenly became threatenin
g. There were the friends who had fed me foods I had not known I was craving but must have been, their offerings were so delightful: a perfectly roasted chicken, braised short ribs, saag paneer, even a plate of cheeses and olives. There were street vendors I smartly chose not to avoid, chowder houses I wandered into, and even nights in my own kitchen when a simple pasta dish, or piece of grilled fish with vegetables, tasted surprisingly good. These experiences didn’t achieve the ideal of complete surrender, but I wasn’t in a defensive mind-set, either.
The first such meal that I’d had in a restaurant came late one winter afternoon more than ten years ago, when Bec and I turned a corner on a side street in Ottawa’s ByWard Market neighborhood and found ourselves standing at a staircase leading to an Italian restaurant below street level. We did not have to discuss whether or not to eat, even though five o’clock was typically far too early for us. We trusted the coincidence. Downstairs we found a small dining room with ten or so tables, most of them for two, all candlelit. The walls were plain stone and exposed beams, but there was nothing fake or calibrated about the atmosphere. We were alone except for two other diners, and although it strikes me now that we were young at the time—in our mid-twenties—we felt comfortable enough to shed a watchful part of ourselves, which was new for us, and is a key to the enjoyment of any meal out.
They brought us fresh bread, of course, either made in-house or at one of the nearby bakeries. The pasta was also homemade. This was the first time I ever tasted burrata, homemade gnocchi, brown butter sauce. We savored multiple courses followed by desserts that were not overwhelmingly sweet. Though we could not exactly afford this meal, it came with the added value of instruction in how to eat well from talented people who took pride in what they did and wished to show us a few things. All gentle persuasion, no coercion. The night concluded with that gratifying sense of feeling surprised to discover our own desires; we had not planned to eat Italian cooking, had not even talked yet about eating at all.
I wanted to feel something like that again. The disappointment of my first post-diagnosis restaurant experience made me all the more insistent on finding it. The Italian restaurant in Ottawa was out of the question, of course, so I decided a few weeks later that it was time for us to make a trip to Vermont, and one of our favorite fine restaurants. In my heart, I knew it was too soon to be making a trip like that. Finding three meals out in a one-day period is entirely different from driving just up the road from home for dinner, but I was eager to return to the way I used to eat and travel.
The place was called Butler’s when we first went there—it has since changed names—and, like the restaurant in Ottawa, we had found it when we were young, and had also learned to love fine dining there. Its status as a culinary school made it approachable, and there was the bonus of an inn attached, which meant you could share a bottle of wine and then have an after-dinner drink before walking (instead of driving) to your room. One night years ago, we splurged on a bottle of Turley Vineyards zinfandel, and from the moment the cork came out I never thought about wine in the same way again. We might have encountered great food and wine at some other place, but the fact that it happened there gave Butler’s a special pull on our affections. Like this whole region of Vermont, it had become synonymous to us with leisure, repose. It seemed as if nothing bad or disappointing could ever happen there.
Our trouble began when we sat down. The menu, which I hadn’t checked in advance, was heavy on flour-based sauces and starches, as well as some other foods I wasn’t handling well at the time. I had known I was taking a chance, but I had also expected to find something safe and appetizing. The server came, and when I tried to give him my spiel it came out jumbled and inarticulate. Bec finished for me, adding, as she always does, that while she’s not celiac she never eats gluten, either. “In solidarity,” I sometimes add with a smile. He did not seem interested.
A few minutes later, he returned with a Gruyère popover, airy and browned and gorgeous. He set it down in front of my wife.
“I know you can’t have this,” he said, jerking his head at me, “but I thought that you”—he nodded at Bec—“might want to try it.”
Her face hardened into an expression I call The Look. Everyone who has a partner knows some version of The Look, and is happy when it’s aimed at someone else. Dr. Sandwich had received The Look, albeit through the phone; others we encountered along the way would receive it. Had this server not listened to a word she’d said? What sort of arrogance was this? Or was he just stupid? Before she could latch onto him, he sped away.
When he returned, he didn’t seem to have any idea which dishes might have flour in them and which might not. He didn’t appear to be well versed in the menu at all, nor was he interested in helping us find substitutions. Clearly, I was a problem. This was a change from our past experiences, and it would have been annoying in other circumstances, but now it seemed threatening. Maybe we had caught him on a bad night. I don’t remember what I ordered—which is saying something, because I can remember just about every other meal I had there—though I do remember not getting sick. The meal, though, was already ruined before the food arrived. We never went back. Trust was now even higher on the list of requirements than inspired dishes and ethically sourced products.
We still had to find more meals the next day. I wanted to do it the way we’d always found good restaurants—by first getting good and hungry and then trusting our luck and instincts as we read menus posted in windows. I think Bec knew how this would go, but she was willing to let me try it. We ended up standing on a Burlington sidewalk, scanning signage for phrases that would indicate there would be something—I was coming to hate this phrase—something for me. We were both cold, and irritable because we were hungry, and I felt stupid and frustrated because in my denial I hadn’t planned ahead and written down some names. Now there were no options in sight that were safe and appealing. Thank God for smartphones, and also for Google Maps, OpenTable, and Urbanspoon.
The easy solution in such a case was to find a Thai restaurant. Drop a celiac in Thailand and, even though he doesn’t speak a word of the language, his chances for survival are better there than anyplace else in the world (on the other hand, if you want to kill him with a country’s cuisine, send him to Russia, or northern China). But I didn’t want Thai. I could get Thai at home. Hell, I was on my way to making my own good Thai. I didn’t want Vietnamese, either. I was so damned sick of rice; it seemed to be all I ever ate anymore. Well, I asked myself, what did Mr. Gourmand want, then? I didn’t know. I wanted someone else to figure that out for me. Wasn’t that what restaurants were for? Was that too much to ask? I wanted to look at a menu and have that moment of sudden recognition I used to have: Yes. That sounds good.
These first disappointing experiences suggested to me that an entire future of eating had gone up in flames. How could I feel emboldened to eat my way across a foreign city—Paris, say, or Prague, or Florence—when I knew that even a slight misstep would knock me sideways and result in the waste of thousands of dollars? It explains why one man with celiac disease I know takes a “travel kitchen,” a personal Chuckwagon (minus Chucklady) complete with cookstove, whenever he travels for conferences and the like. And if I were to play the meals safe and subsist on a Paleo-styled diet for the duration of an extended trip abroad, how could I say that I had truly been to these cities without having savored the foods they were famous for? How the hell does a person go to France and not eat the bread? Go to Hong Kong or Tokyo and not eat the noodles? That was another theme in the gastronomic literature that I had hoped to weave into my own life: one visits a place by ingesting it, taking it in, making it part of him. On the other hand, this seemed a silly and reductive goal. One also visits a place for museums; one takes a place in with sightseeing and copious amounts of wine and cheese (but what about the Roquefort?). In time, I would meet people who made those trips exactly, allergies and all, and they survived to tell me the journey was not a waste. When it comes to food aller
gies, people in cities get it (European cities in particular). This was difficult for me to believe in that first period of adjustment, when venturing out of the state, let alone the country, could and did make me panic. Bec and I had, in fact, canned plans for a summer trip to Newfoundland and Labrador.
My problem, as a brutally honest friend told me not long after that weekend in Vermont, wasn’t just that I was a celiac. Plenty of people with celiac disease ate safely at restaurants all over the country without crying foul. No, my problem was twofold. I was a very sensitive celiac, one whose entire body melted down when he got glutened, instead of just breaking into a skin rash like the lucky ones. When you thought about it, I had no business putting myself in a chef’s hands at all. The second, bigger problem was that I was a sensitive celiac with ideas. I had done a little too much reading, watched a little too much food TV. I thought too hard about what I ate: how I should find it, how it should taste, be presented, and sourced. I had a philosophy of eating that was poorly matched to—how could my friend put it?—my digestive realities. Couldn’t I just chill out, eat some oily fried rice or bad tacos, maybe bottom-feed on a chain restaurant’s overcooked GF pasta or desiccated baked potato for a night, learn to forget all these ideas about gourmet serendipity, and go into the next trip with an ironclad plan? Wouldn’t that be better than bitching about it?
Yes, probably.
