Episode 7 | Three Ways to Find Gluten-Free Restaurants

Enjoy food, enjoy travel and enjoy life. You’re listening to Travel Gluten Free by Elikqitie.

​This is Episode 7, how to find gluten free outside your local town and within the US. Hello everyone. This is a Elikqitie and welcome to another episode of the travel Gluten-Free podcast. Today's episode is focusing on that summer travel because we know summer is right around the corner and I'm excited for someone to be right around the corner. So when I was at the expo last March, one of the items people asked me about a lot was Gluten-Free travel outside and inside the US. So, in this show I'm just going to focus on Gluten-Free travel inside the US; so if you're going outside of your towns to say I live in Park City and I'm going to travel to a town outside of Utah or in Utah, just not in Park City and I need to find food, how do I go back doing that? This is three easy ways to find Gluten-Free restaurants outside your local town and within the US.

So the first suggestion I have for my fans is the find me Gluten-Free app. Now when I talk to people at the Expo in March, I know some people have used that, some people have not. If you have not tried to find me Gluten-Free app, it is a lifesaver when you're traveling on the road. We will be delving more into the app and all it's really awesome features in an interview with the app developer which I'm super excited to bring you guys. So anyway, I'll give you a little bit of information about the find me Gluten-Free app. One of the things I really love about the find me Gluten-Free app is when you download it, you can do a search and you can do a search by category or you can just hit search nearby.


So say you pull off and you're at a gas station and you hit search nearby, it's going to show you and can give you directions to and also gives you reviews from other people who have used the app. Is it Celiac as it says? Is it Celiac friendly? Are the staff knowledgeable? Do they know what they're talking about when they help you? Is the food good? So you'll get a lot of really great reviews and the reviews on here are really good. I feel like people really take a lot of time and effort to put reviews in here that are worthwhile. Every once in a while you'll come across when that's not that great. This app is really good for searching around you, if you know you're going to stop in a specific town, you can put the name of that town in there.


So say I'm traveling to San Francisco, I can put San Francisco, California and I can plan ahead of time at a restaurant or pick a couple of restaurants I want to check out and eat at one. Also it gives their information. So say I find this place I'm just looking near me where I'm at right now because I am not in Park City. I am in Sandy and I find this place is called 'The Tin Roof Grill' It tells me it is $1 sign. So it is inexpensive, it has eight ratings and it is open today from 11-9:30. And then it gives me a map so I can click on that map and it will map it for me so I can drive right to it, easy as cake. And it also tells me my Gluten-Free features so I can tap on here and see that it has beer, dessert, a Gluten Free menu and pasta and some other categories that people have labeled it as free Wifi, kid friendly, late night restaurant and Tapas.


So I can tell about the restaurant, what it offers and it also has a phone number. So if I want to double check and make sure that their Celiac friendly or that they offer certain foods, I can do that by calling their number right from the app. It also has a website on here so I can click on their website and find more information about the restaurant and it has hours on there as well. So this app is such a great tool and I road-trip a lot and I use this app every time I road tripped. The only time I can't use this apps if I can't get any data. It also has an area for people to take pictures and put photos in there. And so each restaurant has its own information and then people put reviews and people put pictures on there and then the app developer approves it to put it on the site.


This is a really great app and I would definitely suggest getting this app if you are traveling anywhere inside the US; they have some really great things. So this is just all the stuff you can do in the free version. There's also a paid version, which I have as well. It's $19:99 and I love it because I can click on what is open right now and you'll tell there's a lot of places on Sunday that are not open because it is a religious day in Utah. So with that filter I can find places that are open on Sunday if I want to go out to eat on Sunday, which is really great. You can search by chain stores, you can search by other things as well. It has a lot of different search activities. One of them is most Celiac friendly, which is really awesome.


Closest by address, you can search for it by category. So they have all different types, like Asian brunch, Chinese dairy free, dedicated Fryer, dedicated kitchen space, dessert, French toast. Oh my gosh, I'm really getting hungry because I haven't eaten lunch. Anyway, takeout, Vegan, vegetarian friendly. So there are a lot of different options to touch on here, this is a really great app. So definitely the number one suggestion I would give to my Gluten-Free friends is definitely download the find me gluten free app. It is free, they have a paid version but there's lots of really great features on their free version that will help you get around if you were traveling outside of your hometown and you need to know where you can safely eat food because you and I both know no one wants to be sick on their vacation cause that just stinks. So definitely download your find me gluten free app and look for the episode where I interview the app developer in a future episode. It's going to be really great.


The number two suggestion for finding Gluten-Free outside your local town. A lot of towns will have either a local chamber of commerce, which some restaurants might be a membership of or a restaurant association or group. So in Park City, because we are a Ski town and we do obviously have a lot of tourism in our area, we have our own local restaurant association. So check out the town that you're going to, they may have a local restaurant association and that could be a good place to start as well. So you can call the restaurant association and find out, you can also go online and find local restaurants, by website, if they don't have a restaurant association, just Google Gluten-Free restaurants in Akron, Ohio and see what comes up. Definitely call ahead, check out their menu online.


The web is a great resource for us who cannot eat Gluten because usually you can tell by the menu well, it'll have it labeled or if it doesn't have it labeled and they say they have Gluten-Free offerings, definitely call the restaurant ahead of time. And what I do is I pick out a few places and I'll either map them on my phone and send myself a map or I'll put them in an Evernote. Evernote is a great free app that you can use to download Evernote. You can have it on two devices for free. So I download Evernote on my phone and then I link those addresses. I just make a note of my travel and where I'm going and then I make links to things that I need and phone numbers so that when I am in, wherever, I'm going to say I'm in Portland, Oregon and I am looking at, "Hey, where can I eat in Portland?"


I'll put a couple restaurants on there with their phone number and I'll with their link to their website and I can check those out so I have those ready to go. So that is my tip number two. So finding local restaurants either online or by checking out that local chamber of Commerce or Restaurant Association or restaurant group that would be in the town you're going to. So definitely do that, that's another great resource.


The number three I would suggest for searching for a Gluten-Free restaurant is 'TripAdvisor.' So TripAdvisor, you probably know, has a lot of great, just regular like things to do, I use it a lot just to find out what to do in the area. cause I don't like to spend a ton of money when they go on vacation. I don't mind spending it, but it has to be something of real value to me.


For example, if I'm going on a cruise this summer with a girlfriend, which I'm very excited about and I don't mind spending money on snorkeling gear and going snorkeling, but I'm not going to pay somebody 40 bucks to say, "Hey, the coral reef is right here off the beach" You know, it's just not worth it. So that's what TripAdvisor is great for. TripAdvisor is great for finding out the things you can do that are a little more of a discounted price. And if you do want to spend the money, they have those options as well. So I really love it for that reason. Definitely check out the reviews for places, definitely check out a lot of the other things to do on TripAdvisor. But I found this is pretty good for looking for Gluten-Free restaurants. So for example, I just opened up TripAdvisor and it says popular places to go.

So I figured, what the heck, I'll just check out, what is it I'm checking out. I don't even know how to pronounce this. Mira Keck, Mira Keck, I believe it's in Spain. So I'm in Mira Keck Spain, I want to go to Mira Keck Spain. I click on restaurants and it has, here's browse Mira Keck by food. So it gives you Cafe, Italian pizza, Seafood, Sushi, French. You can also browse it by moderately priced. You can browse it by fine dining, by meal, breakfast, lunch, dinner, cheap eats all these other options as well. So if I go up to the top, I can filter this by Gluten-Free. And I believe you can do this on the app as well. So if I hit the search on my app, I'm looking for a Gluten-Free and it says restaurants with Gluten-Free food. So I in Mira Keck. So I clicked on that and here's a list of restaurants.


There are 48 restaurants in Mira Keck that offer Gluten-Free food. So, and it gives the number one is Narange and they do it by review. So it has 1,203 reviews and four and half stars. It says Lebanese, Moroccan Mediterranean fusion, Middle Eastern, vegetarian. I am so hungry. Vegan options, Gluten-Free, it's open from 11:30 in the morning until 10:30 it has the website, you can click on here to find the website and then it talks about people rating the food. Now on this one, obviously all the people on here are not Gluten-Free so you're not going to get a specific Gluten-Free review like you would on travel Gluten-Free. But this one gives you the option of looking at different places around the world. So if you're going outside the US, I would definitely suggest using TripAdvisor. Even inside the US you can use it; I like to use find me Gluten-Free if I'm inside the US because the reviews on there are specifically people who are eating Gluten-Free. So the reviews on here or not, but you can find places internationally on TripAdvisor that serve Gluten-Free food, which is really great and they have reviews and this place looks really good and I just want to eat this picture through my phone cause I'm really hungry. Anyway, definitely check that out.

My number three is TripAdvisor, look for Gluten-Free restaurants, especially if you are traveling outside the US, so a little bit of outside the US in the show. We'll talk about that more later if you're finding-- if you're going outside of your local hometown, my three suggestions are: One, find me Gluten-Free app to check out awesome reviews from people who are Gluten-Free just like you about different restaurants, you can search nearby, pretty awesome.

Number two is to find local restaurants, we are going to either online through the local Chamber of Commerce, the restaurant association or just by searching online locally where you're going. And number three, look for Gluten-Free restaurants in TripAdvisor because they will give you some local ones but they'll also give you international as well, which is pretty great, especially for my international travel fans, definitely check that out.