One of the best celiac-friendly restaurants in Japan that I added to my must-visit list before our trip!
This past autumn, I spent nearly six weeks traveling through three countries in East Asia: Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. It was my second-ever trip to Asia. It was for my honeymoon. And it was my first big trip after receiving the life-changing diagnosis of celiac disease only a few months prior.
I’m usually not an over-planner when it comes to travel, but I knew that I was going to need to be as prepared as humanly possible for this massive undertaking. When I started my research, it didn’t take long to learn that Asia is not an easy place to travel for celiacs — there really isn’t a lot of awareness of gluten in general, so gluten-free (especially is a medical concept) isn’t super well understood. But considering that only 0.18% of people from Asian backgrounds have celiac disease, compared to like 1-5% of those from European backgrounds… it’s hard to blame them.
During the two months between my diagnosis and leaving for my trip, I did everything I could to prepare as much as I could while still at home. And I wrote this post, 7 Ways I’m Preparing To Travel as a Celiac For the First Time, which highlighted a lot of the steps I was taking.
But how did they pay off? What worked, and what didn’t? What lessons did I learn?
Well, it’s time to find out! 😉
Prep Step #1: Requesting a Gluten-Free Meal for the Plane
Expectation: I would have a gluten-free meal on the plane.
I mean, the flight between Paris (where we had our layover) and Tokyo was like 15 hours. A girl’s gotta eat. This was my first time ever requesting a special meal on the plane, and I guess that’s forever now which is wild.
Reality: I had a gluten-free meal on one of the planes…
On the flight from Paris to Tokyo, I was pleasantly surprised by the whole GF meal situation! It was specially labeled with the European certified gluten-free icon, which I thought was kind of impressive for airplane food. It was also cool to get served before everyone else!
On the flight back to Europe at the end of the trip, from Tokyo to Paris, there was a whole thing that happened. Our flight got canceled due to mechanical issues (but only after we’d boarded and sat on the plane for four hours). We couldn’t get rebooked until the next day. When I talked to the rebooking agent on the phone, I repeatedly asked them to ensure I had a GF meal on my profile.
But the next day, when it was mealtime, the Air France staff told me that there was no GF meal for me because it hadn’t been requested 48 hours in advance. (That is hard to do when you only get booked on that flight 24 hours in advance.) I had been starving for the last three weeks of the trip, basically since we left Japan, and I didn’t have any gluten-free snacks left. I was in for a looooong 15 hours.
Luckily, the flight attendants sprung into action trying to accommodate me as soon as they learned of the situation. They gave me mini pre-packaged Brie cheeses from the regular meal, and then got a plain chicken breast and some fruit and vegetables from the first class meal for me! (I’m not highly reactive and I felt comfortable eating this food after lots of questioning.)
They also came back later (while I was asleep) and read some sort of passengers rights thing to Matt, saying that I had a right to eat and they had a duty to care for me or something. And they gave us a €30 voucher for a future Air France flight.
Lesson learned: Even though there was basically nowhere to get GF snacks at the end of our trip, I should have brought something with me from home and carried it around for six weeks just so I could have it on the plane home if needed.
Prep Step #2: Downloading the FindMeGlutenFree App and Saving Lists
Expectation: Reading reviews from other users would be helpful, and the user-curated lists would be great for finding safe options in different cities on my trip.
Reality: The FindMeGF app was a lifesaver! I found myself double- and triple-checking reviews before choosing to eat somewhere.
But I really didn’t use the lists too much. I used them as a starting point for creating my own maps (more on that later) but the lists were almost a bit too general to be very useful. I found that other users had different criteria for what qualified as a “safe” restaurant than I do. Also, finding a list called “Tokyo” that has like 40+ places saved and they’re scattered throughout the entire, massive metro area of Tokyo, was more overwhelming than helpful at times.
Lesson learned: Saving other users’ travel lists wasn’t super helpful, but giving them a quick scan for places that caught my eye before incorporating them into my own plans was more useful.
Prep Step #3: Joining Gluten-Free Travel Destination Groups on Facebook
Expectation: This would be a great way to get insider tips and tricks about being gluten free in each of the countries I was visiting.
Reality: While I joined them for Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, only the Japan one was really useful at all.
I mean, there are 25,000 people in the Gluten-Free Japan Facebook group, and being part of it was soooo helpful. As I was encountering foods for the first time in Japan, it was great to have a place to search through thousands of old posts and comments to see what other people had said about it in the past. I was even able to get almost instant feedback on things I wasn’t sure about! There is a lot of uncertainty about gluten in food ingredients in Asia, just because things are labeled differently. Being able to lean on the lived experience of people who are highly symptomatic telling you whether they had a reaction or not — it’s so helpful!
But Taiwan’s gluten-free Facebook group only had 1,200 members, and it wasn’t very active. Same with South Korea and their 3,000 members. Plus, I read a lot of contradicting information in these groups — people arguing whether the sweet potato dough balls at Taiwan’s night markets were safe or not, whether South Korea’s iconic 10 Won bread was gluten-free or not… it just made me more confused and less likely to trust anything I was reading.
Lesson learned: These Facebook groups are a good idea, but they aren’t useful if there aren’t enough members and it’s not active enough. Places that are huge international tourist destinations are more likely to have big, useful groups.
Prep Step #4: Making Reservations at Safe Restaurants
Expectation: This would ensure that I had a few opportunities to eat really good food at places that guaranteed celiac safety
Reality: I was really glad I had these reservations, but not every country really *does* reservations, so this pretty much only applied in Japan.
What I loved though, was that all the places we had reservations in Japan obviously were serving Japanese food. It really did upset me to have to be around so much delicious looking food that I couldn’t eat during the entire trip. Having these reservations made me feel like I wasn’t entirely missing out — at least for a meal or two.
At the same time, it was helpful not only because of the food being guaranteed to be safe, but it also took the stress out of having to figure out where to eat for every meal. When you’re struggling to find safe food options for three meals a day for nearly six weeks straight, that’s a lot of food anxiety.
Lesson learned: In places where it’s very difficult to find celiac-safe gluten-free food, I will try to make advance reservations at safe places, just to guarantee the experience and take some of the stress off for future, traveling me!
Prep Step #5: Mapping GF-Friendly Restaurants on a Google Map
Expectation: When we were out and about exploring the city, I would be able to pull up this map on my phone to find safe options near me.
Reality: This was probably the best thing I did in order to prepare for this trip!
As a quick refresher, I created my own Google Map and plotted hundreds of safe food options on this map, across seven cities we visited on this trip, all color-coded by safety rating and food type/cuisine. I did use listings on FindMeGF to help me create this and code the safety ratings. But I got to decide what I felt comfortable putting on the map, and there was nothing on there that I didn’t want.
This is one benefit of using my own map instead of FindMeGF — sometimes I find that FindMeGF clutters your screen with non-safe options, places with no reviews, or it doesn’t show you everything until you’ve zoomed in to a certain point, making it hard to see all your options. With my personal map, I also added it as a shortcut on my phone so I could open it with one tap, and it would also geo-locate me, showing where I was compared to the nearest places I’d pre-vetted! Matt also added the shortcut to his phone, and we used it pretty much every day.
Lesson learned: For a major trip like this, it’s definitely worth creating my own map. I’ve taken shorter trips within Europe since then, and FindMeGF has worked fine but mostly because the cities are smaller, the trips are shorter, and gluten-free options are more ubiquitous. But my own GF map was the MVP of the Asia trip!
(Check out my gluten-free Tokyo map as an example!)
Prep Step #6: Creating a Pinterest Board With Pictures of Safe Snacks
Expectation: Having pictures of safe convenience store food easily accessible from my phone would make it way faster/easier to grab snacks without having to scrutinize every single ingredient label.
Reality: This was true, once again, only in Japan.
Using information I read in other gluten-free travel bloggers’ posts about Japan and the Gluten-Free in Japan Facebook group, I was able to cobble together a Pinterest board with 42 pins (pictures) of safe gluten-free convenience store snacks! Plus, some of those pins even had multiple pictures on them. I rolled into Japan feeling like I knew exactly what was safe and what wasn’t. When I walked into a konbini (like 7-Eleven or Family Mart) I had all these pictures pulled up on my phone and I just had to make sure the ingredients hadn’t changed before grabbing something and feeling pretty safe about it.
As much as I tried to ask for pictures of safe things from the Taiwan and South Korea Facebook groups, I never really got any traction, which I chalked up to low participation. But when I got to Taiwan and South Korea, I realized it’s because there were almost no safe options.
I decided to try to make my *own* Pinterest boards, and this is all I could really come up with:
- Taiwan: Pino and Coolish ice cream (imported from Japan, already proved safe); Pop Corners; SoyJoy bars; fruit
- South Korea: Laughing Cow cheese; string cheese; pre-packaged rice; soft-boiled eggs; gummy candy
Lesson learned: Again, this concept worked in Japan, but not so much in the other places. I probably should have taken it as a sign (or maybe a bad omen lol) that I wasn’t going to be able to find a lot of snacks in Taiwan or South Korea. So maybe doing this in the future will give me a good idea of what to expect from a gluten-free perspective from a country overall.
Prep Step #7: Downloading Gluten-Free Translation Cards in All Three Languages
Expectation: When I was in a restaurant, I could pull out this little digital card on my phone that explained, in that country’s native language, that I cannot eat gluten for medical reasons — and the cards go into detail about what foods do and don’t contain gluten, as well as important preparation measures to avoid cross-contact. This would make it easy to ensure the restaurant understood my needs in their own language.
Reality: The translation cards didn’t actually help a ton. I was glad I had them, but a lot of times when we went into restaurants, they either looked at the card and then just said everything was fine, or they just kind of stared at it in confusion like they didn’t know what to do. Since gluten isn’t really a concept in Asia, I can totally understand the confusion. I mean, what if I was working at a restaurant in the U.S. and someone came in with a card translated from Japanese into broken English saying they were severely allergic to “emulsifiers” in food. I’d be like, what does this even mean? I’d want to help, but I’d also be unclear on where to even start.
Despite that, there were a few situations where people did really try their best to help! One waiter at an Indian curry restaurant in Kyoto took my phone back to the kitchen (with my permission) to show it to the chef and find out which of their menu items were safe.
And by the time we were in South Korea, and I was basically only eating at restaurants that I already knew were safe thanks to the FindMeGF app/my own research, showing the Korean GF translation card to a waiter was like flashing a membership card to a secret society — they instantly knew without reading what it meant and what menu items they could recommend to me. 🤣
Lesson learned: I’m glad I had the cards, and I’ll probably try to make sure I always have them on hand when visiting new places, but I probably wouldn’t pay for them — the free versions would be sufficient for the amount that I used them and the amount that they actually helped.
However, by the time I got to Taiwan, I had come up with my own initial screening system for talking to restaurant staff or food vendors when I saw a food that I thought *might* be safe. I would write a message in the Notes app of my phone and then put it into Google Translate and show it to the worker. Basically, I’d ask whether the food had any seasoning or additives or if it was relatively plain — and then I would add that “I have some food allergies.”
I felt that this opened up the conversation in a better way — the concept of allergies are typically more understood, and by being vague about what my specific “allergy” was, it put the onus on the worker to tell me exactly what was in it. This really only worked super well when foods were relatively plain, but it still helped me find a few more safe meals!
Okay, there’s a quick (okay maybe not so quick) rundown of how well all my gluten-free preparation actually worked in practice. I was in for a few surprises, but I learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work, and I’m looking forward to taking these lessons into my future travels.
Learn more about being gluten-free in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea:
What are your best steps for preparing to travel as a celiac or as a gluten-free traveler? Do you like any of these ideas? Let me know in the comments!
-Cathy
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