So much to update
Hello there! I haven’t forgotten about Allergen Dad, I promise! It’s just that 2024 ended up being fairly, well… full!
So much has happened since my last post and I need to update on all of it. I may give snippets of updates here and there on a few things and then expand on the in future blog posts as I try and get up to speed again. But I wanted to pick up where I left off, back in January!
As I wrote in my last blog post, Oh dear, Zizzi, we had a difficult time at Zizzi at the very beginning of the year. The blog post gained quite a lot of traction, getting consistent hits across the year despite not being very active on the website and getting multiple heartfelt comments. The truth is that quite a lot happened on the back of that blog but I’ve felt a little conflicted and uncomfortable about writing it up. But the fact that I’m still getting comments means that I should at least update with the subsequent facts and perhaps reach out for yet more feedback.
What happened, in summary, was that my daughter was given a cow’s milk cheese pizza when we ordered vegan cheese. I also ate some of it as did two of my kids, causing reactions in all of us. I can’t really play it down; I had a really tough week on the back of that, dosed up on antihistamine and ibuprofen to manage days of abdominal pain and also left feeling frustrated and helpless from the experience.
I reached out to Zizzi on the back of the blog post, first on Twitter and then referred to their Operations Manager. While obviously the experience in the restaurant was negative, I really can’t fault their corporate response. They took it very seriously, launching an internal investigation and diligently keeping me in the loop with the progress. I said it at the time, I felt genuinely heard. There was no passing the buck or marginalising of the issue. They were completely transparent that a fairly new member of staff had made a mistake but that the management processes to catch such process risks didn’t seem to have been followed either. I was sincerely given the impression that they’ve looked holistically at this incident to see what they can learn and improve on, rather than just to protect themselves.
I said from the start that this is all I can hope for in doing this blog. People will always make mistakes and it’s unreasonable to expect every person involved in food production/serving to have a intuitive feel for all the allergy risks they constantly manage; but there should be process management and escalation points to minimise this where possible and incidents like these need to be used as catalysts to improve this.
To be completely transparent, Zizzi refunded the cost of our meal and gave us an e-gift voucher for more than this again as an apology for our experience and in hope that we will come back to their restaurants in future. To be honest, in my mind the refund is appropriate and I think I would have been well within my rights to demand this at the time in the restaurant. The gift voucher was kind and I expect we will use it at some point although we still haven’t yet, 10 months on. But the gift voucher hasn’t affected my opinion of whether they did a good job investigating and understanding the learnings afterwards. I said to their operations manager well before the gift voucher that I was grateful for how seriously and responsibly they dealt with it all.
One of the reasons I didn’t update on this immediately at the time was that Zizzi did ask, almost in passing, whether they could see the blog post before it was published. While I feel I’ve been pretty positive about the subsequent reaction to the original mistake, I felt conflicted about the suggestion that I might give any editorial input to a company with a vested interest in how it was conveyed. As such, somewhat selfishly, I sat on the information unsure what to do. I guess I’m here now leaning towards asking for forgiveness rather than permission.
My other concern is that at least two of the comments on the last post suggest that there have still been similar incidents at other restaurants in the chain. I don’t want to end up as a corporate mouthpiece of the company preaching that everything is now resolved if that isn’t really the case. I would be really interested to hear from anyone who has eaten at Zizzi with allergies in the last 6 months as to whether you’ve had a good experience or not. Fingers crossed the majority have, but it would be really helpful to hear in the comments if that is the case. If it isn’t the very least I can do is go back to the contact I now have there and let them know.
Not only have we not yet used the Zizzi gift voucher, we’ve barely eaten out at all since the beginning of January. This is due to a combination of factors. I’ll admit that the Zizzi experience scared us a bit – I was surprised how uncomfortable I was for pretty much a whole week with the reaction and suddenly managing that risk seemed like too big a hurdle. Griffin, my youngest, having apparent allergies to ingredients that aren’t in the standard 14 allergens that need to be listed (rosemary, strawberry, blueberries for example) makes everything much harder.
This is almost certainly a subsequent blog post but we had an experience back in the summer that I’ve never had before. We took my oldest (Piglet) to see a play in the West End of London (Matilda, it was amazing!) and ate out beforehand. It’s slightly easier when it’s just him although we still have to ‘guess’ a bit what my wife can eat to not pass allergens on to our youngest (Griffin) through her breastmilk. We chose the restaurant because it had a detailed allergen menu online and we could basically choose what we would (ideally) order before we arrived. However, on placing our order and notifying that we had multiple allergens, alarm bells seemed to go off for the manager of the restaurant and then effectively refused to serve us; claiming that they could not guarantee the food would not contain our allergens.
I’ve never been flat out refused service before, even if I’ve been made to feel a bit uncomfortable or showered with disclaimers of cross contamination etc… In the end, I dug my heels in and insisted that they did and that I would take responsibility if there was any problems. I even offered to sign something to that effect if it would help but I don’t think they wanted to have the interaction formally documented. On one hand, I admire the courage to effectively say ‘our procedures aren’t up to scratch, I don’t want to put you at risk’. But on the other hand, I get the feeling it was only when we started to state multiple allergies that the red flags came up. Surely we can’t have been the only people to order with any allergy at all that night? And so if you can serve one meal confident that it doesn’t have milk and another confident that it doesn’t have soya, why should it make a difference if it’s then milk, soya and peanuts all in one meal – especially when we’ve said that we accept any risk of ‘may contains’.
The other big change, and I feel this is somewhat deserving of a drumroll, is that we have (finally!!) managed to move house. I am writing this from my ‘pseudo-office’ in our bungalow (yes, really) in Oxfordshire. The change has been monumental and finally moving has just helped us realise quite how much we needed to move. We seem to have grown, both literally and emotionally, into the extra space in the new house and have started the first steps of establishing a new life out here.
The little three seem less and less little every day. Dragon has just stared pre-school and goes in one day a week now. I guess it’s the benefit of being a younger child but while Piglet had the familiar weeks of tears at drop-off when he first started nursery (albeit, materially younger than Dragon is now); she was so excited to go and walked straight in for her first day with hardly a glance back! Griffin is now a full-on toddler and becoming increasingly communicative. His favourite thing this week is an old photo of me with a school friend which we have printed out and he constantly clutches is and just shouts ‘DADDY!’ at anyone he can show it to. It’s very sweet even if he doesn’t effectively act as my own personal room entry alarm.
This is close to becoming a teaser of various blog posts to follow but my wife is getting close to being able to launch her business now that we’ve moved and she can start setting up a client base. I’m very excited about seeing her get her new project up off the ground. I’m sure she’ll be brilliant but it is a bit nerve wracking too. I will sure to be share a link to her website for all things prenatal and antenatal when it’s up and running.
For me personally, I’m looking forward but I am also cautiously nervous about setting up a new life for myself in our new location. The village that we’ve moved to seems incredibly friendly. We’re really happy with the school from what we’ve seen but also heard so far. And I’m loving being a bit more out in the countryside than we were previously. My commute is significantly shorter, far more beautiful and we have a wealth of new local interests to explore and discover. It’s hard not to describe it as idyllic, really. But I’m also aware that we’ve been here over two months now and I’ve yet to really integrate myself into the community at all. Three kids and a demanding job is a natural justification for this to some extent, but it’s also easy to use it as an excuse as well.
I didn’t manage to really ever build any meaningful network where we used to live and it seems ironic but also lucky that we already have probably more friends and family near here than we used to have at our old place – at least for me, not necessarily my wife and the kids. I promised myself I’d do a better job of getting to know people here and it’s certainly too early to say that’s failed. I really like that the school is very ‘local’ which means that most of the other parents live very close by and we’ve been good at going along to events through the school. But I find it funny that my wife is automatically part of a WhatsApp group of parents but I’m not as the dad. I’m sure I can gently rock that boat in time.
If that’s an attempt to dismantle a gender/role stereotype then I guess my other approach is the opposite: there’s a board games night in the local pub every other Tuesday. Work, poor planning, poorly kids and poorly adults mean that I haven’t actually made it to one of the nights since I found out about it but that is definitely an example of something I can roll my sleeves up and jump in to. There’s no user guide to making friends in a new village though. I wish I could take a leaf out of my son’s book as he seems to have settled very quickly.
The next major occasion is to plan for our first Christmas at home. Or at least the first Christmas where we’re deliberately at home rather than confined there because of Covid. We’ve usually gone to one of our parents but this year felt like the right one to branch out on our own. There’s a whole load of new traditions to find but also quite a few I want to preserve. We’re thinking about significantly dialling down the complexity of the Christmas Day meal so that I can spend more time with the family and less time cooking a complex roast dinner. It helps that I’m no-longer confined to a postage-stamp sized area of kitchen worktop counter in the new house but I also have to recognise that kids who are full of vegan chocolate and who don’t really like roast dinners anyway are unlikely to shower me with praise for a meal that’s taken 2-3 hours to cook!
There are family traditions to preserve though: a Chinese feast on Christmas Eve, a family trip to the pantomime – possibly even back to the one I used to go to as a child! A near-Christmas trip to some illuminations. A forced Boxing Day walk whether people want it or not etc… But I also think we’ll need to carve out a few specifics for ourselves. Do let me know if you have any specific things you like to do as young families over Christmas that we could politely adopt!
Well, that will do for now. I have firm plans to make sure I start updating more often going forward.
Toodlepips x
