For Special Dietary Requirements, Which Food Is The Best?

Food is the part of an event people remember, and the part that most often goes quietly wrong. Not because it was bad. Because two people at the table could not eat it, said nothing, and went back to their desks hungry.

We have catered out of Fortitude Valley since 2005, and the dietary line on an order form has changed more in that time than anything else on it. It used to be the occasional vegetarian. A corporate order for forty now routinely carries four or five separate requirements at once: coeliac, dairy free, vegetarian, vegan, and sometimes a nut allergy that is not a preference at all. Building a menu around a vegetarian or vegan diet and everything sitting alongside it is not harder than it used to be, but it has to be done on purpose and it has to be done first.

The mistake nearly every organiser makes is treating a dietary requirement as a subtraction — the same menu with something taken out, sent as one lonely portion on the corner of a shared platter. It never survives contact with a hungry room. What works is the opposite: a menu where most of the food suits most people to begin with, and the few genuinely separate items arrive as a whole serve, packed apart, and obvious on sight without anyone having to ask.

Before the menu, the vocabulary. Four words come up on almost every order that mentions dietary needs, and each one means something quite specific in a kitchen rather than something general on a form.

What gluten free and dairy free mean

Gluten free. Gluten is the protein in wheat, rye and barley that gives dough its stretch — the reason bread holds a shape at all. Some people avoid it by choice. For someone with coeliac disease it is a medical matter, and the amount that causes a problem is far smaller than most people assume. That distinction is worth asking about, because the two answers get different handling in the kitchen. A preference can be served off the same bench with clean tongs. Coeliac means a separate board, a separate knife and a separate tray, because the crumbs are the problem, not the loaf.

Two things are worth knowing about gluten free bread before you order it. It is denser than wheat bread and it stales faster, so a gluten free round made at six in the morning for a one o'clock lunch is not the same food at one that it was at eight. And it dries at the cut edge quickly, which is why ours go out wrapped rather than lying open on a platter. If the gluten free option is sitting uncovered next to everything else, it is losing quality faster than the thing beside it.

Dairy free. No milk from any animal, which means a good deal more than leaving the milk jug off the tray. Butter, cream, yoghurt, cheese and everything built on them are all out. It is the requirement most often missed by accident, because dairy hides. Pesto usually has parmesan in it. Most creamy dressings start with buttermilk or sour cream. Pastry is butter. A platter of sandwiches with no cheese anywhere on it can still be full of dairy if the spread was butter rather than oil.

Lactose intolerance and a milk allergy are also not the same thing, and that is worth a question too. One is discomfort a few hours later. The other can be serious within minutes. We treat every dairy free note on an order as the second one, because being careful costs us nothing and guessing can cost somebody their afternoon.

The vegetarian traps that catch people out

Vegetarian. No meat, no poultry, no fish. The trap here is never the obvious protein — it is the small ingredients that came from an animal without looking like it. Anchovy in a Caesar dressing. Fish sauce in a Vietnamese dipping sauce. Gelatine in a jelly or a marshmallow. Animal rennet in some hard cheeses. Worcestershire sauce in a marinade. A vegetarian who has been caught out once tends to ask about all of them, and they are right to.

How much vegetarian food to order

Quantity matters more than variety here, and this is the single most useful thing we can tell you. The complaint we hear back about corporate orders is almost never that the vegetarian food was poor. It is that there was not enough of it, because everybody eats the vegetarian option. Order about a third more of it than the number of vegetarians in the room and it will come out roughly right.

Vegan food and why it needs naming

Vegan. Nothing from an animal at all, which adds honey, egg and every dairy product to the vegetarian list. It is the strictest of the four and, oddly, one of the easiest to cater well, because vegan food is usually built from whole ingredients rather than assembled out of things that have to be checked. Beans, lentils, grains, nuts, seeds, fruit and vegetables are all vegan without anyone needing to read a label.

What a vegan order does need is naming. A vegan guest looking at an unmarked tray will assume the worst and eat nothing, and that is sensible rather than difficult. We put the dietary marking into the product name itself for exactly that reason, so it survives being printed on a run sheet, forwarded in an email and read off the side of a tray at the far end of a boardroom. A note in the special instructions box gets lost. A name does not.

Ask the room, not the organiser

One more thing that belongs with all four. Ask the room, not the organiser's memory. People who have had to explain a requirement a hundred times stop volunteering it, particularly new starters and particularly to someone senior. A one-line question in the meeting invite gets a better answer than trying to remember who did not eat the sausage rolls at the last one.

None of this calls for a separate, sadder menu. The food that copes best with dietary requirements is usually the food that was already the best thing on the table: fresh, assembled rather than cooked into one dish, and easy to keep in components. Five things come up again and again on our order forms, and they earn their place for practical reasons as much as anything else.

1. Fresh Vietnamese rice paper rolls

A rice paper roll is naturally gluten free and dairy free, and made with vegetables it is vegetarian and vegan as well. The wrapper is rice flour and water. Nothing has to be substituted and nothing has to be left out, which is why it is the first thing we suggest when an order carries four different requirements and one platter of budget.

Two notes from the bench. Lay them in a single layer and never stack them — the wrappers stick to each other within minutes, and pulling them apart tears the roll open. And check the dipping sauce, because the standard one is built on fish sauce and is not vegetarian at all. Ours goes in a separate cup for that reason, which has the useful side effect of keeping the rolls from going soggy on the way to you.

They also hold their looks longer than most fresh food, which matters when a morning meeting starts late. Kept covered and cool they are still presentable three hours in. Left uncovered in a Brisbane office in February the wrappers go tacky and dull in about forty minutes, so leave the lid on until people are actually in the room. If you order one thing for a mixed dietary group and want to stop thinking about it, order these.

2. Fresh Salads

Salads do the heaviest lifting on a mixed dietary order because they are built rather than cooked, so almost anything can be left out without wrecking the rest of the bowl. A garden fresh salad is gluten free, dairy free, vegetarian and vegan exactly as it stands, with nothing removed and nothing announced to the room.

The exception is the one everybody assumes is the safe choice. Caesar salads are none of those four things: the dressing carries anchovy, parmesan and egg, the croutons are wheat, and the bacon and chicken settle the rest of the argument. It is a very good salad and a poor default, and it is worth knowing which of the two you are ordering for a room you have not asked.

Dressing on the side is not fussiness, it is timing. Leaves dressed at seven in the morning for a midday lunch collapse. The salt and acid draw the water out of them, and by the time the lid comes off you have a wet bowl and a limp salad that was perfectly good five hours earlier. Sent separately, the same salad is still crisp at one o'clock, and the dairy free guest can see what is about to go on it instead of guessing. Everything in our range of fresh salads travels that way for both reasons.

Two more habits worth adopting. Give the dietary bowl its own tongs — a shared pair moves croutons into the gluten free salad within about two minutes of a queue forming, and nobody ever sees it happen. And keep the protein out of the base salad rather than picking it out later. A bowl of leaves with the chicken in its own tray beside it feeds vegetarians, meat eaters and the person who is simply not hungry, from one order.

3. Burrito bowls

A burrito bowl is a dietary menu wearing the costume of a single dish. Rice or quinoa at the base, then beans, grilled vegetables, shredded lettuce, salsa and guacamole, every one of which is gluten free, dairy free and vegan before anybody adjusts a thing. Cheese and sour cream are the only two items that have to be kept out, and both send perfectly well in their own cups.

Sent as components rather than assembled, it solves a problem no other hot dish solves: everyone builds their own, so nobody has to ask out loud for something to be left off. For the person with the requirement that is worth more than the food. It is the difference between being catered for and being the exception the room had to work around.

Watch the guacamole and watch the rice. Guacamole browns at the surface within about an hour of meeting air, which is cosmetic rather than a safety problem but looks like exactly what it is, so keep it covered and put it out last. Rice does the opposite of what people expect — it firms up as it cools and it does not come back, so a bowl base is at its best inside the first hour and merely acceptable after three. Order it for the hour people are eating rather than the hour that suits the delivery run.

4. Sushi

Sushi looks like the safest thing on a corporate catering menu and quietly is not. The rice is fine, the seaweed is fine, the vegetables are fine. The soy sauce is the problem. Ordinary soy is brewed with wheat, so a coeliac guest who eats sushi with the soy that came in the box has not eaten gluten free, and almost nobody knows that. Tamari is the swap and it has to be asked for rather than assumed.

Two more that catch people out. Imitation crab is usually bound with wheat starch, so a California roll is rarely gluten free. And Japanese mayonnaise, which turns up in more rolls than you would think, contains egg, which puts those rolls outside a vegan order. Vegetable rolls — avocado, cucumber, pumpkin, tofu — step around all of it, and they are the ones to order in volume when the room is mixed rather than ordering a mixed tray and hoping.

Sushi also has the shortest good window of anything on this list, for the same reason a burrito bowl does. Cold rice hardens. A tray that was excellent at eleven is noticeably firmer by two, and putting it in the fridge overnight makes that worse rather than better, which is the opposite of what most people assume about refrigeration. If sushi is going to be on the table, have it delivered close to the hour it will be eaten and take the covers off at the last minute rather than the first.

5. Sandwiches

The sandwich is the least fashionable answer here and the one that feeds the most people for the money. It is also the most adjustable thing we make, because every part of it is a separate decision: the bread, the spread, the filling, the leaves. Change one and you have a different dietary category without changing the order.

Gluten free bread is the obvious substitution and the one that needs the most care. It stales faster, it is drier at the edge, and it has to be built on a clean board with a clean knife or it is not gluten free in any meaningful sense. In practice that means gluten free rounds are made first, before there is any wheat flour or crumb on the bench. That is an ordering consideration for you rather than a detail for us, because it is the reason we would much rather know the day before than on the morning.

Dairy free is easier than it looks. Swap butter for hummus, avocado or a little olive oil, leave the cheese out, and the sandwich is usually better for it, because a spread with flavour in it does more work than one without. Roasted vegetables with hummus, or falafel with tahini, are vegan without ever having to be described that way, which is exactly how the person eating them prefers it.

Then wrap and mark the dietary rounds separately instead of laying them in among the rest. An unmarked gluten free half in the middle of a mixed platter gets eaten by somebody who did not need it inside the first two minutes, and the person who did need it goes without and says nothing. When our sandwich platters go out with dietary rounds on them, those rounds sit in their own boxed section for that reason alone. It is the single cheapest fix on this page and the one most often skipped.

Three habits, and how to order

The whole job comes down to three habits. Ask the room rather than trusting anyone's memory of the last event. Order dietary items as whole serves rather than tokens, because one of anything on a platter for thirty is decoration. And keep components separate — dressings, sauces, wet from dry, hot from cold — since almost everything that goes wrong between our kitchen and your table is a timing problem rather than a cooking one.

The ordering side is straightforward enough. Our cut-off is 4pm for next-day delivery, dietary items included, and there is no last-minute surcharge for adding one. Delivery starts at $19 on orders over $150 across more than 50 Brisbane suburbs, Saturday at the same rate, and pick-up runs from 7am at 159 Knapp St in Fortitude Valley. Everything is made by hand in that kitchen the morning it goes out, which is also why the gluten free rounds can be made first — the order of work is ours to arrange, provided we know before the bench gets busy.

Plan the dietary part first rather than last and it stops being the difficult part of the order. Done properly, nobody at the table has to mention it at all, which is the only measure of success worth having.