Methodology

We here at The Allergen Guide want to provide a great resource for people and families to look into restaurants before they go out and potentially questionable experience.

In order to provide this we needed to come up with criteria that could be easily re-testable across all restaurants.

We have a list of questions that we ask the wait staff to gauge their knowledge (and thus the training on allergy awareness), a list of things to confirm on menus, and things we track of from the moment the order is put in to the moment the food is on the table.

Another way we improve the quality of our guides and restaurant ratings/badges is the fact that we strive to publish only after we have a few different experiences at the one restaurant. This allows us to measure more than one waiter, and track different experiences over different days.

We also take your experiences into account! If feedback is given, whether positive or negative, about the allergen experience at a restaurant we've reviewed, we will review those and issue Editor's Notes if needed.

There are a few inevitabilities. Menus change, accidents happen, food preparers change over time, and quality can wax and wane. This makes it difficult for reviews to remain relevant for too long. We will re-review restaurants we've reviewed every 6 months to a year in addition to the feedback our community provides.

This page will be where we show updates to our grading criteria and in the future will be where our specific questions will be listed.. as well as our full grading criteria. This way you can keep us accountable, give suggestions on new testing methods, or give it your own go and help grow the amount of reviews on this site.