Sir Edmund Hillary

These are the voyages of the Celiac Tom, continuing my mission to explore strange new restaurants and other eateries, to boldly go where no Celiac has gone before.

I thought my last adventure to a pizza joint was rough, but I almost didn’t come back from this one. I found myself this week at the World Championships of Irish Dancing – Oireachtas Rince Na Cruinne for those of you who have been pestering me to dual post in Gaelic. I go to a lot of these things and, as a practicing Celiac, am usually relegated to Hershey bars from the gift shop for my sustenance. For days on end.

However, as you may have picked up from my previous posts, I am such a giver. It’s all about wanton disregard for my own health and safety to make life safer for you, the loyal readers of Celiac Bites. I take it as my ordained destiny to go
where no Celiac has gone before and find gluten free dining options – no matter what. Failure is not an option. Well, maybe failure is an option, and usually much easier, but it’s not as much fun to write about and doesn’t sound nearly so heroic.

The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts

In this weeks adventure, I attempted to find gluten free food options at The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, host of the competition. “Worlds” as insiders call it, is a big deal. Thousands and thousands of people come and go throughout the week so the food is “volume optimized.” You know, where armies of temporary catering people bring in truckloads of pre-made box lunches and chafing dishes. Hmmm, this was to be a challenge to find anything more than bottled water.

My first evaluation of the buffet lines from hell was not encouraging. Chips of all types were present in abundance. All types fatal to Celiacs that is. The chips that actually contained gluten were arranged in very tasteful fashion with those that were simply cross contaminated. The artistic arrangement showing a progression of near certain death to simple illness was quite creative, and while pleasing to the eye, it still offered me nothing to eat.

Next in line were the chafing dishes of hamburgers and hot dogs. For those of you who don’t know, chafing dishes were used for thousands of years to torture food into eternal states of lukewarm purgatory and limit the quantities of food eaten by guests at large banquets and dinner parties. Chafing dishes were banned worldwide (for the good of humanity) at The First Geneva Convention of 1864. Through a little known legal loophole insisted upon by the Belgians, legal chafing dish use by convention catering companies was grandfathered in. As a side note, this was also the first recorded use of an “earmark.”

Given the storied history of chafing dishes, I was not keen on exploring further, but this is Man vs. Celiac, so I did. Opening the lid to the hamburgers, my keenly trained eye detected subtle movement. On closer examination it turned out that the burger patties were actually rising. Apparently that phenomenon can occur when lowest bidder burger patties, made with 74% percent pure gluten meal filler, are exposed to lukewarm chafing dish heat for more than 30 consecutive hours. So that ruled out the burgers.

Towards the end of the insta-buffet, I finally spotted my opportunity for a safe, healthy, and gluten free dining experience. Coke. And of course Diet Coke. At least I could cover one of the four basic food groups. Coke is one of the food groups right?

Chalk up another successful mission and documented episode of Man vs. Celiac. So next time you’re at a convention, just make a beeline to the very end of the insta-buffet and find your satisfying and refreshing gluten free Coke. Or Diet Coke if you prefer.

Sir Edmund Hillary

These are the voyages of the Celiac Tom, continuing my mission to explore strange new restaurants and other eateries, to boldly go where no Celiac has gone before.

I am such a giver.

This post marks the beginning of a (hopefully) long-lasting series in which, I, your host, in the spirit of great adventurers past and present, will go forth into the dangerous world of restaurants and attempt – at great peril to myself and others – to eat gluten free. In the process – assuming that I live – I hope to share my findings so that others may follow the trail that I have blazed through my own personal sacrifice. Like I said, I am such a giver.

To kick things off, I am going boldly where no Celiac has gone before, straight to the K-2 or Everest of restaurant challenges – a homemade pizza restaurant. In this case, it was lunch with my wife, Aunt Rissy, at a neat little place called Brixx Wood Fired Pizza.

After she dragged me in kicking and screaming we walked in, the first thing I noticed was the entirety of their cooking apparatus – a huge brick oven, filled with poisonous disks of agonizing death pizzas. Very cool looking, but not too promising for me. However, this is Man vs. Celiac so I had to improvise, adapt, and overcome and find something safe there to eat so I could share the experience with you. As you may recall, I am such a giver.

I was encouraged when I glanced at the menu because I immediately saw another section besides wood fired pizzas. On closer examination, it turned out to be a variety of South American intestinal parasites pastas. Not good.

Fortunately, they did have three salads on the menu. The Brixx Salad looked fairly promising as it contained mixed greens, pine nuts, goat cheese, croutons, and homemade balsamic vinaigrette dressing. Nix the croutons and I might have a shot at a small rabbit food snack. In my case, I also elected to nix the Pine
Nuts as ever since acquiring Celiac, nuts of most any kind seem to torture me. I don’t know why. Maybe someone has started a blog out there called “Man vs. Pine Nuts.” Anyone know?

Just to be safe and able to report good solid information back to you, I threatened our server Julian with wedgie-boarding if he did not tell me exactly what they put in the balsamic vinaigrette dressing. After reviewing the ingredients, all seemed clear and Julian told me that “it should be fine.” Gee, that was comforting.

Just as he was walking away with our order I was hit with a flash of brilliance. This is why I get paid large sums of money nothing to write this blog. Having owned a pizza restaurant for six years (pre-Celiac!) I had a total recall vision of exactly what a pizza kitchen looked like. For those of you not familiar, just over the counter area where all the dough is thrown and flour liberally distributed throughout the kitchen, there are about a million containers that hold all of the ingredients that top pizzas. Being the quick thinking adventurer, I asked Julian if the goat cheese on the salad came from the same container as that for the pizzas. I had visions of flour coated hands reaching into a pile of now flour coated goat cheese and tossing that mess right on my salad. Good catch if I say so myself! Julian checked and reported back that they had a separate salad station with its own goat cheese so “it should be fine.”

The salad was great by the way and the homemade balsamic vinaigrette dressing was impressive – simple yet well done. I am still angry with Aunt Rissy for
enjoying her Barbecue Chicken Pizza so much in my presence, but I suppose I will forgive her in a few weeks. She says she is making me Gluten Free Italian
Chicken tonight so maybe I will forgive her then.

So what do you think? Was this outing successful? Is it possible to eat gluten free at a pizza restaurant? Let me know what you think and I will post the answer in 24 – 48 hours.

If I am still alive.