When you have food allergies, a
dinner date starts with research. A lot
of information can be found online, but when you’re already in the car the
direct approach can be faster.
My sister and I went out to dinner
last night. She is highly sensitive to
Monosodium Glutamate (MSG), but was craving Italian food. Does Italian food have MSG in it? We weren’t sure. A phone call later, we had learned that
Johnny Carino’s, the restaurant we were considering, had an allergy menu!
Armed with that information, we
braved the restaurant. As we entered,
two smiling women greeted us. Neither of
them was the woman with whom my sister had spoken, but she had left
instructions for them to have a copy of the allergy menu ready and they handed
it to us promptly. There were no
pictures, but across the top of the printout was a list of ingredients (eggs,
milk, MSG, and wheat) and whether or not the dishes, listed down the left side
of the page, contained those ingredients.
A short way inside the restaurant
we were seated at a table for four, nestled in a corner with privacy walls on
either side. From where we sat we could
see two rows of booths and the open kitchen.
The music was what I would call “soft,” and played just loud enough to
be heard over all of the conversations simultaneously taking place.
We were still inspecting the menus
when our waiter approached and introduced himself. One of my primary reasons for suggesting the
restaurant had been the wide range of Italian sodas that they carry—ten flavors! After deliberating between orange and cherry,
I decided to try black cherry, just for the fun of it. The first sip was like ordinary black cherry
soda. Then I remembered that I hadn’t
stirred the cream in; it was still floating lazily in the top two-thirds of the
glass. Ah, much better! A creamy black cherry soda is an experience I
recommend enthusiastically!
After a delicious soup and salad (hearty
minestrone for my sister, house salad for me), our main dishes arrived. I had selected chicken fettuccini, a dish I
had tried before and liked. My sister,
this being her first meal at Johnny Carino’s, selected the spicy shrimp and
chicken pasta and carefully cross-checked it against the allergy menu. Beware the spicy shrimp and chicken! It’s loaded with garlic and so good that my
sister had to force herself to stop eating it.
She was full, but was enjoying it so much that it was just hard to put
her fork down.
The bread was crisp on the outside
and soft on the inside. The minestrone
was *; the chicken fettuccini was rich and creamy; the spicy chicken was
unbelievably tasty. The black cherry
Italian soda sparkled. Then we ordered
dessert. A lemon cream cake with
gorgonzola cheese. I suppose it was my
high expectations that made it fall flat for me. I was expecting a burst of lemon flavor, not
tart, but (almost) overwhelming. The
cake itself tasted liked a medium-quality cake mix, a tad dry and given to
large crumbs. The lemon flavor was
there, but the faint—worse yet, the flavor was overshadowed by the powdered
sugar that the cake top had been dusted with.
Being a practical person, I tipped the cake over and tapped the top with
the handle of a utensil until most of the powdered sugar had been knocked off. Then I tried it again. I finished it, but I can’t say it was $6
worth of good.
That was the only disappointment,
though. The waiter was pleasant; the
allergy menu was above and beyond the efforts I have seen other restaurants
make; and 98% of the meal was rave-worthy.
In fact, to quote my sister as we left, “Oh, that was good.”
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