How to make dining out allergy-safe

A few years ago, Kelly McDonnell took her son Hayden out to eat. He has food allergies, and she asked the server if a particular menu item contained eggs.

The server said no.

When the food came, Hayden took a few bites and broke out in hives from egg whites in the dish. Hayden recovered, but for some people with food allergies, such a situation could have been deadly.

St. Paul City Council Member Melvin Carter III can relate, as his 3-year-old daughter, Maylena, has a severe peanut allergy. That's why he's sponsoring a new city ordinance requiring restaurants to display a poster for employees that outlines food allergies.

If approved, it appears St. Paul would be the first Minnesota city to have such regulation. New York City recently approved a poster requirement for restaurants. Earlier this year, Massachusetts enacted a law that requires posters for restaurant staff, labels on menus that tell customers they're obligated to make their allergy known and training for food managers.

"This is a life or death scenario we're trying to avoid," said Carter, who will likely introduce the ordinance next week. It's a scaled-down version of an earlier controversial proposal, and it appears to have some support.

But many people in the restaurant industry say that dealing with allergies is fairly common in kitchens, one reason why many chefs and owners don't like regulations. Customers have a responsibility, they say, to disclose an allergy so restaurants can avoid a dangerous reaction.

"Regulation is absolutely absurd," said Russell Klein, chef/proprietor of Meritage in St. Paul. "I have a vested interest in not making my customers sick or, extrapolating from there, killing them."

While he said the poster requirement is easy enough to comply with, he's skeptical.

Many questions about food allergies remain, but more people have them -- now an estimated 12 million Americans. About 3 million children had a food allergy in 2007, an 18 percent increase in a decade. Each year an estimated 30,000 people visit the emergency room and 150 die because of allergic reactions to peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, eggs, milk, wheat and soy.

Under Carter's proposal, any establishment with a restaurant license in St. Paul must prominently display a food allergy awareness poster where employees will see it. Ignoring the ordinance would be considered a "critical-major" violation, meaning it could result in immediate disciplinary action by the city.

A companion ordinance would discount fees for license holders who ensure that supervisors have watched a training video and who have written policies for how to handle situations when customers say they have allergies.

"My goal is to improve the likelihood that when my family or another family with food allergies walks into a restaurant and asks, they'll get reliable information," Carter said. "The poster [requirement] improves that likelihood."

Mandated safety traing

Dave Siegel, executive vice president of the Minnesota Restaurant Association, said restaurant owners are keenly aware of the seriousness of food allergies. A better solution to Carter's concern, Siegel said, would be for food allergen awareness to be required as part of state-mandated food safety training.

While his group can live with the poster requirement, concerns about liability remain. Poster language is still being fine-tuned, too.

Siegel's group lobbied Carter to skip the regulation and let the industry make a voluntary effort to improve allergy knowledge among its membership. That didn't happen, but Siegel said the association will still include allergy awareness articles in a trade publication and in e-mail notifications. Food safety training classes also will include more information on allergens, he said.

Carter's original ordinance proposal would have required anyone holding restaurant and catering licenses to provide an allergen information handbook with copies of all ingredient labels for food being served, in addition to other requirements.

The reaction was loud and swift: unworkable and too time consuming, restaurant owners and chefs said.

While Carter said he didn't intend to create a lot more work for restaurants, the outrage led to discussions with the industry, food allergy awareness advocates and others.

David Burley, CEO of the Blue Plate Restaurant Co., has been working with Carter on finding a suitable solution. His company owns the Highland Grill and Groveland Tap in St. Paul, as well as eateries in a few other metro cities.

Burley said his servers are told to ask "Preference, or allergy?" when a customer asks for an ingredient to be left out of a menu item. If the customer says it's an allergy, then the server notifies the management and the food is cooked in a clean pan away from the rest of the other food preparation, he said.

Wendy Wessel, executive director of the 300-family strong Food Allergy Support Group of Minnesota, said her group isn't looking to eradicate food allergens from kitchens but instead find people who can tell them what's in a dish when they ask.

"We as consumers have to be able to make an informed decision," she said.

Chris Havens • 612-673-4148