Eating gluten-free abroad: what to check before you sit down

For most people, arriving in a city where you cannot read the menu is a fun problem. For someone with coeliac disease, a wrong guess costs days. For someone with a wheat allergy it can cost minutes — an IgE reaction starts within minutes to a couple of hours and can escalate to anaphylaxis, so if you carry an adrenaline auto-injector, it travels with you and stays on you.

Most of the ways this goes wrong are predictable, and most of them can be settled before you order.

The safe-by-construction list

Before you worry about the hard cases, build a shortlist of things that are gluten-free unless someone has gone out of their way to ruin them. These are your fallback orders in any restaurant, in any language:

• A whole piece of grilled or roasted meat or fish, with vegetables or a plain side. Whole piece is doing the work: sausages, meatballs, burgers, pâté and terrines are usually bound with breadcrumb or rusk
• Salads — but check the dressing, and know that tabbouleh is bulgur wheat, couscous is wheat, and panzanella and fattoush are bread. Picking croutons off a salad does not make it gluten-free
• Rice dishes where the rice is the thing — risotto is the one to question, though the risk is the stock rather than the rice: commercial bouillon frequently contains wheat or malt extract
• Soup that is clearly broth-based, with a question about thickening (see below)
• Fruit, fresh vegetables, plain eggs, plain cheese

If you can eat one of these every night, the week is fine. The question is what to do when you want more than the fallback.

The words that mean gluten

You do not need to be fluent. You need three words, and across most of Europe the gluten one is recognisable on sight because it shares a root — learn the shape and you can scan a menu in a language you do not read.

Gluten-free. French sans gluten, Spanish sin gluten, Italian senza glutine, German glutenfrei, Dutch glutenvrij, Portuguese sem glúten, Polish bez glutenu, and Danish, Norwegian and Swedish glutenfri.

Where that root stops helping, and where you want it written down before you go: Finnish gluteeniton, Hungarian gluténmentes, Greek χωρίς γλουτένη, Russian без глютена.

Flour, because that is what batters and pan-coatings are described with: farine, harina, farina, Mehl, meel, mąka, Turkish un, Russian мука.

In East Asia the useful word is not gluten at all — it is wheat. In Japanese that is 小麦 (komugi), and it is the thing to ask about, because gluten is not a category most kitchens there think in.

Write the phrase down rather than relying on saying it. In the EU and the UK a restaurant is legally obliged to be able to tell you about gluten-containing cereals, even for food served loose. Elsewhere that is a courtesy rather than a duty, and gluten may not be a word the person taking your order has been trained on — which is exactly why a written card beats a spoken question.

The dishes that look safe and are not

Anything breaded or battered. Cutlet, schnitzel, fish-and-chips, tempura, anything with a crispy coating. The coating is flour unless the kitchen makes a separate gluten-free batter. Separately, and more easily missed: chips and fries are naturally gluten-free and are routinely cooked in the same oil as breaded food. That is why "separate fryer" is the question that matters — and in Britain, why the malt vinegar on top undoes the whole thing.

Soy sauce, and anything glazed or marinated. Ordinary soy sauce is brewed with wheat, which makes it gluten in liquid form across Japanese, Chinese, Korean and much of Southeast Asian cooking — in marinades, glazes, dipping bowls, stir-fries and fried rice. Grilled fish in Tokyo is usually a soy-sauce dish. Tamari is the wheat-free version, but do not assume it is what is on the table.

Anything pan-fried with a sauce. A flour-thickened pan sauce is the standard technique in a huge number of cuisines. "How is it cooked?" is the question here, not "is it gluten-free?"

Soup and stock. The cheapest thickener in the world is flour. A soup that is not thin is suspect until you ask. Broth-based soups that are clearly just meat, vegetable and stock are lower risk — but they are still built on stock, and stock is where commercial wheat hides.

Anything on toast. Bruschetta, crostini, tartines, smørrebrød — anything arriving on a slice you did not order separately.

Sauces you cannot see. A cream sauce might be fine and might be flour-thickened. A curry might be fine and might have a wheat-based thickener in it. The question is the same every time: "What is in the sauce?"

The pattern to internalise: if the gluten would be visible on the plate, you probably know it. If the gluten would be inside the cooking process, you need to ask.

What to ask before you sit down

If you have found a place that looks promising — one with a gluten-free section on the menu, a dedicated gluten-free kitchen, or a reputation for catering to it — do not skip the pre-visit question. A two-line message or a phone call is worth it:

• "Do you have a dedicated gluten-free kitchen, or do you prepare gluten-free dishes in the same kitchen?"
• "Do you have a separate fryer for gluten-free items?"
• "Can you confirm that the [dish you want] is prepared without cross-contact with gluten?"

The second and third questions are the ones that separate a kitchen that has been told to be careful from a kitchen that has actually built a system. "Separate fryer" and "separate prep" are the answers that mean something. "We try our best" is an answer, but it is a weaker one, and you should know that before you commit.

You can settle most of this from the pavement — a two-line message, a phone call, or an app like NearEats that lists a venue's diet options before you walk over. Walking in and reading the menu works too. The point is only to move the question earlier than the plate.

What not to ask — and what to do instead

"Is this gluten-free?" is the right question about the dish you intend to order. It is the wrong question asked eleven times about a menu the kitchen has never audited. Ask about the specific dish, ask about the kitchen's general approach, and accept that some things will be a no without an explanation.

If a place is genuinely unable to confirm that something is gluten-free, that is information. It is not a failure on their part — most kitchens simply have not built a gluten-free system — but it is a signal to move on rather than gamble.

The honest limit

No amount of checking makes a meal in a shared kitchen safe in the absolute sense. Cross-contamination is real, it is not always visible, and it is not always avoidable even in a careful kitchen. If you have coeliac disease or a severe allergy, the safest option is a venue with a dedicated gluten-free kitchen or a verifiable celiac menu, and even then you are relying on the venue's word about its own processes.

One thing "gluten-free" does not mean is wheat-free. It is a threshold — under 20 parts per million — and products and kitchens meeting it may still use deglutinated wheat starch. That is fine for coeliac disease and not fine for a wheat allergy. If yours is an allergy rather than coeliac disease, ask about wheat specifically, not gluten.

The method above reduces the odds. It does not eliminate them, and it is enough to make most weeks work. The same pre-visit discipline — settle the questions before the plate — is the whole method for other dietary requirements too; see kosher food away from home for the sister walkthrough.

The short version

• Build a fallback list of safe-by-construction dishes and keep it in your head.
• Write down the local "gluten-free" and "flour" before you go — and in East Asia, "wheat" — rather than trusting that you can say them.
• Question anything breaded, anything with a sauce, and anything soup.
• Ask the kitchen about its process before you sit down, and listen for "separate fryer" and "separate prep."
• If a place cannot confirm, move on.
• No check is a guarantee. Only the kitchen can speak to its own cross-contamination.