Man vs. Celiac: The Pizza Restaurant

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.