If you have celiac disease or any form of gluten intolerance, you already know the ritual: your friends recommend somewhere new, you spend fifteen minutes reading reviews and hunting down the menu, you find enough GF labels to feel cautiously optimistic. But then you arrive to find a completely different menu with no allergen information in sight. So you have a conversation with your server, who doesn’t have any answers to your questions, so they check with the kitchen, and suddenly you’ve inadvertently become the person that’s holding everything up, inquiring about cross-contamination protocols, working so hard to avoid making a scene that you’ve made one anyway. At the end of all that, you wind up ordering the garden salad. Your friends stare at you with pity from above their actual meals.

All of this discomfort — down to resigning to eat the garden salad — could be avoided with descriptive allergen menus. Restaurants know what allergens exist in a dish, but the information is often shared on a need-to-know basis. Pallergen is flipping the dynamic by making allergen information not only visible, but descriptive.

Our menus answer the questions:

• If an item is labeled GF, is it gluten-free as-is, or do I need to ask to modify it?
• If a dish can be modified, how is it modified? Is that modification going to compromise the caliber of the dish, in which case I’m better off ordering something else?

The theory we’re testing is that folks with dietary restrictions will flock to and pay more money at restaurants that offer allergen menus. We’re starting with southern Maine, a region we’d argue is one of the best in the country for GF dining, and building outward. If you want to be part of shaping what this looks like, we’d love to hear from you.