Eateries Catering to Celiac Patients

As a longtime chef in four-star restaurants, Joseph Pace had seen appreciative customers before. But nothing prepared him for the day that a well-dressed man walked into his New York restaurant, ordered a pizza and a beer, and broke into tears.

That man, Pace recalls, had been diagnosed 10 years earlier with celiac disease -- an incurable affliction that makes the body unable to take anything containing gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye.

The pizza and beer that Pace serves in his Greenwich Village restaurant Risotteria, like many other items on his menu, are formulated with substitutes for wheat and barley, making his place a magnet for people who have celiac disease. The customer told Pace that he hadn’t been able to enjoy a pizza and a beer for a decade.

“This is what the restaurant business is,” Pace said. “Making people happy.”

Not every customer may be as effusive, but Pace says he gets tremendous amounts of feedback from customers, who also help him try out new recipes. His latest experiment is a pasta made from white beans. Rice, the main ingredient in risotto, is naturally gluten-free.

Founded five years ago, Pace’s restaurant quickly became known among people with celiac disease, who make heavy use of the Internet and e-mail to share restaurant recommendations.

Several major restaurant chains are also reaching out to the celiac community.

Outback Steakhouse, P.F. Chang’s and other restaurant companies offer menus of gluten-free dishes, and more are joining them.

Last month, Mitchell’s Fish Market, a 13-restaurant chain based in Columbus, Ohio, introduced gluten-free menus. And six months ago, Boston-based Legal Sea Foods did the same at its 31 restaurants.

Richard Vellante, executive chef at Legal Sea Foods, said his company adopted a gluten-free menu after hearing requests from customers and noticing that competing restaurants were doing it.

Many people with celiac disease miss the textures that come with eating foods that contain wheat, such as crusty bread, croutons in salads and crispy fried foods, which often contain bread crumbs or flour, Vellante said.

So Legal Sea Foods worked on making substitutes -- chick pea croutons for salads, cornmeal for frying and chick pea crumbs for baking instead of flour. Many items, they found, unexpectedly contained gluten and had to be excluded from the celiac-safe menu, including cocktail sauce, balsamic vinegar and blue cheese. Gluten is often added to foods as a stabilizing agent.

“A lot of restaurants don’t appreciate this,” Vellante said. “I was surprised by it. I did not realize how many people are gluten-sensitive.”

Awareness of the disease has been growing rapidly in recent years. In 2003, a major study found that 1 in 133 people in the United States may have the disease, far more than had been previously believed.

For people with the disease, dining out can become a source of anxiety because of the risk of unintentionally eating something that contains gluten.

Kevin Seplowitz, a former computer security expert who developed the first commercially produced gluten-free beer, Bard’s Tale, was diagnosed with celiac disease almost four years ago.

He quit going out to dinner, fearful of inadvertently eating something with gluten in it.

“I think the most underappreciated aspect of being diagnosed with a chronic disease is the psychological impact,” Seplowitz said. “You have to be very diligent about it. If we order something and say, a barbecue sauce had beer in it and they say it didn’t, we get sick.”

Outback Steakhouse, a casual-dining chain with 760 restaurants, has offered a gluten-free menu since 1998.

“They’re a very loyal following,” Ben Novello, president of Outback Steakhouse, said of celiac patients. “The return goes beyond the sales that we generate from the loyal customers we get. It goes to goodwill.”