Dining out When Your Family Has Food Allergies

For want of a nail, a shoe was lost.” For Paul Antico, the old proverb went the other way. For want of a restaurant with allergy-friendly options for his family, AllergyEats was born. weekend in 2006 when his wife went away with their daughter Ashley on a trip, leaving him at home with Tucker and Keegan. “We went to eat out on Saturday night because my cooking is limited to breakfast,” Antico confesses. “All the places we usually [went to] that I knew we were comfortable with had long waits. We ended up driving around for two hours, the kids were so upset and hungry, and I’m frustrated because I just didn’t know where to go. We ended up at a small pizza joint that had egg-free pasta. I just kept thinking as I drove, ‘I wish there was a guide.’ ”

For Antico, this was no idle wish. When he left his job as a financial analyst two years later, looking for a new direction and to de-stress, he began planning AllergyEats in earnest and, in early 2010, officially launched it. Today, AllergyEats is the largest online guide to allergy-friendly restaurants nationwide. The website and mobile app encompass large restaurant chains, small diners and everything in between. Users can search for restaurants by specific food allergy or intolerance and location; AllergyEats also provides live links to restaurant websites, online menus, restaurant ratings, a “Food for Thought” blog, and even a Disney World specific dining guide.

“My goal is to alleviate a bit of the stress that often accompanies food allergies,” Antico writes on the site. “It will mean a lot to me if I can help a child enjoy a special birthday dinner in a restaurant, rather than just another hot dog somewhere easy.”

You can help!

AllergyEats is always looking for restaurant reviews from

families with food-allergies and sensitivities. If you would like to share a review about a restaurant you have visited—good experience or bad—go to AllergyEats.com or download the mobile app.