Shady Grove
Posted: July 12th, 2009 | Author: Scott | Filed under: Restaurant Reviews | Tags: Austin, barton springs, Celiac, gluten, Gluten free, restaurant, shady grove, south austin, tacos | 2 Comments »Shady Grove is a wonderful and very “Austinish” local restaurant. It’s located on Barton Springs in south Austin and is one of the places the people with whom I work like to go for lunch. I haven’t been to Shady Grove (or many restaurants really) since I was diagnosed with celiac.
Last week, my coworkers were planning a lunch and were also planning to meet a friend of ours who is now retired. I really wanted to go, so I called the restaurant the night before and went through my normal spiel and discovered they had a gluten free menu! (I suspected they might. It’s that sort of restaurant.)
We went to lunch on Thursday and I explained my need to the waitress and she came back with a gluten free menu. Actually, it wasn’t just a gluten free menu. They had sections for dairy free, vegetarian, and vegan selections as well. I had the brisket tacos which were great. There weren’t a huge number of gluten free options, but there were enough for some range of choice. And mostly I was just happy to be able to go out and have lunch with friends safely somewhere.
Two thumbs up and a shout out to Shady Grove!
That’s way cool! WOW!
We have a gluten free store near my home, but no way is there a restaurant… Two of my children are allergic to dairy, and I’ve often been glad it’s *just* dairy. That’s hard enough (they have to forgo most desserts at potlucks, etc) and yet gluten…shoot. That’s in almost everything Americans call food.
A woman at my little church is allergic to gluten and each Sunday I always try to pick her up something special to munch on during the after service coffee hour (we have a before-service coffee hour too…I’m guessing it’s an Episcopal thing?)… 🙂 It sucks to not be able to be included in community meal times.
Austin’s not a bad place overall to have special dietary needs. I knew that would be the case as soon as I heard the diagnosis. I was very thankful I lived here and not some of the places I lived growing up! Still, as you say, gluten is in almost everything processed or in restaurants. It’s a challenge to find places where I feel I can eat safely. In some ways it’s complicated for me since I’m not allergic and don’t tend to have the immediate, strong reaction that people with food allergies have. But I am actually very sick and it’s been disturbing to discover just how sick I am and didn’t realize it. (Strangely, I hope as I heal and become accustomed to no gluten that I will start having a stronger reaction to accidental exposure so I’ll at least know.)
That’s wonderful that you do that for the woman in your church. I know how it makes me feel when people try to do things like that for me. I’m not really fond of the attention paid to my special needs at time, but at the same time I really appreciate that they thought enough about me and of me to want to include me.
And it is hard not to be included. The daughter of some friends of ours got married on Saturday. Beautiful wedding. We didn’t notice on the invitation that it was a dinner reception until Friday though. (It was an afternoon wedding, so those often don’t do the whole dinner thing.) Fortunately, my youngest daughter really wanted to go. She hadn’t been to a wedding or reception before, so I let her go in my place. Otherwise I would have been in the awkward position of sitting at dinner and not being able to eat anything because I didn’t know what was in it.