Oh dear, Zizzi

“Not the best” – this is how my very good friend would describe this day. This is fairly ‘hot off the press’ and I’m writing it frustrated. Frustrated with the experience but also frustrated with myself for not knowing better after years of dealing with allergies. But before I can tell this story, I need to update you on a bit of the background…

So as you’ll know by now if you’ve been keeping up to date with the last few posts, we are now a family of five with all three children growing alarmingly quickly. Piglet will turn eight later this year and has suddenly become obsessed with reading; devouring whole novels in a handful of days. Dragon’s adorable personality is emerging from the toddler she so recently seemed to be; infinitely caring and considerate but fierce and judicial. Griffin has resolutely decided that he is no longer a baby and is determined to push forward to ‘toddler’ at a rate of knots; quickly crawling, eating with vigour, and making first steps (almost literally) towards standing and talking.

Unfortunately, with the ‘eating with vigour’ we have found some stumbling blocks with what he seems to be able to eat. He took to food so quickly that despite our best efforts to introduce allergens slowly and separately, it was difficult to keep him from the food choices of his siblings once he tackled full meals. Given our existing allergies, we don’t have milk, soya or egg in the house and so naturally he hasn’t had those allergens yet (although we plan to test those in time, even if unlikely to form a part of his daily diet at home). But he started to show reactions to other foods in ways we struggled to isolate. The symptoms are painfully familiar from experiences with the other two but to ingredients we’ve not had problems with before.

He first seemed to have a reaction to a meal with salmon in it. An eczema-like rash that appeared around his thumb and first finger on both hands. He then had a similar reaction to a beef rendang shortly after which contained fish sauce; so we presumed fish might be an allergen for him. But he then reacted to beef bolognese at our house after Christmas but not at his grandparents, which eventually led us to suspect celery as well. In the interim we’d cut out mustard and anything containing sulphites too as they were in some of the meals he’d reacted to; although they may be red herrings (not that he could eat herring). The slightly confusing part was that he then seemed to react to a subsequent bolognese that we’d deliberately made without celery on a second sitting but not the first. We wondered whether maybe we’d got the wrong portion out of the freezer or wondered whether we’d included something else alongside the meal but my best estimate at this point is that the acidity in the tomato sauce irritates his hands when they’re already red-raw and sore; making it look like he’s having a new reaction.

There are a range of reactions ranging from the rash on his hands and face that shows up live while he’s in the middle of eating to digestive issues that seems to show up with a longer lag than we’ve been used to with the other two. I won’t go into too much detail over what that involves – I don’t know what time of day you’ll be reading this or what you’ll be attempting to do in parallel – but he seems to get a delay before a series of quick dirty nappies, all with a common unpleasant smell. The worst bit is that this seems to cause a nappy rash so bad that he clearly experiences terror at the prospect of having his nappy changed and with some blood when it’s at its worst. It got so bad the other day that we had to take him to the doctors where they prescribed a barrier cream and a referral to a paediatrician to look at the problem in more detail.

Back to today – we got up in a hurry with an unsurmountable task of getting the house ready for a double viewing late in the morning. We’d meant to do more preparation the night before but having taken Piglet ice-skating and general tiredness from a first week back at work/school/normality after Christmas, the previous evening just disappeared. Getting anything done with three children in tow, it turns out, we find pretty much impossible. Trying to tidy and clear a house that hasn’t been sorted since the addition of Christmas presents and 3 weeks of travelling, celebrating and just general playing is not a 2-hour job. We just about managed to get the house to a passable state by the time they knocked on the door and then held them waiting for a couple of minutes while we got all people and remaining stuff outside the house.

Obviously you can never know how a viewing is going to go, but it’s fair to say that we were pretty gutted to see the person who came for the viewing leaving while we were still trying to catch our breath and getting the kids into the car. I think we can safely say that wasn’t a sale. We’ll get to hear the estate agents’ feedback at the beginning of next week.

One of the common threads of having regular (unsuccessful) house viewings at the weekend is that we often have to be out of the house around lunchtime on a Saturday. It’s often too difficult to ask the kids (or us as adults) to wait until early afternoon to eat and too taxing to prep lunch before leaving while simultaneously trying to clear up in the kitchen. This often means trying to find the easiest, quickest and cheapest (although it seems like a regular significant expense) way to get lunch while out of the house.

Today we headed to Zizzi, one of our closest restaurants to where we’d usually park in Windsor and with a good selection of suitable food with a good allergen menu. I’ve covered before that you might expect Italian food to be really bad for someone who wants to avoid milk (cheesy pizza and creamy pasta sauces) but actually the chains (and increasingly independent or smaller places) are really good at offering vegan alternatives and very transparent allergy information. It was the first time we had taken Griffin to Zizzi since the realisation of extra possible allergies and I wasn’t 100% sure what he’d be able to have. In truth though, pretty much everything that was dairy and soya free was also free of his other possible allergens, with the exception of kids bolognese which contains celery (not that the adult bolognese doesn’t which is a potential trip risk).

As usual, I explained to the waiter that we’re allergic to soya, egg and dairy when ordering – pretty much a force of habit by now. But my wife then correctly pointed out that we have other allergies to now to check. Technically I also don’t think I can eat peanut anymore but I don’t tend to say that one when ordering for myself which I should do. By the time we’d mentioned milk, soya, egg, fish, mustard and celery as things Griffin is trying to avoid, I could see the eyebrows on our waiter rising higher and higher and he quickly suggested he got the manager to take the order (not uncommon when dealing with allergies).

At this point, I’ll admit that I’m conflicted about this. I can understand why someone working in a restaurant would start to feel apprehensive when someone walks in explaining that they have 6+ allergies to manage, especially when we ourselves aren’t 100% sure whether all of them actually are allergies at the moment. But it may well be that we are dealing with all those allergies and either way, with him only just starting to recover from a bottom so sore he’d scream if you touch it, we did definitely want to avoid all those foods until he was more recovered and we could reintroduce those foods in an structured way. Secondly, the allergen menu that they have covers all of those allergens very clearly and we had already checked while choosing that all of the options we thought we could have were suitable to the best of our understanding. Put simply, I would also feel some anxiety if responsible for taking an order covering a wide range of complex allergies; but it’s perfectly reasonable for someone with those allergies to expect a restaurant to cater for them as long as there are options on the menu that meet those criteria (and in some cases even if not).

To my slight surprise, the original waiter came back and said that he had spoken to the manager and as long as we were choosing things in line with the allergen menu then it would be fine. I didn’t digest this as such at the time but he was effectively saying that we’d said too many allergies for them to be able to process but we were fine to be responsible for ourselves. (Strike 1).

We ordered a range of items from the kids menu and then two main courses from the adults menu, noting to ourselves that the only cross-over risk would be that Griffin wouldn’t be able to have any of Piglet’s pasta – everything else was allergy compatible. The food came quickly and was tasty on all counts; Griffin very much enjoying some pesto (vegan) pasta.

We’d ordered a ‘vegan margarita’ with added ham for Dragon, which I think always causes a bit of a glitch in the matrix. Obviously, we’re ordering vegan pizza because we can’t eat the milk in normal cheese rather than because we have a vegan diet; so then adding meat products often gets a few checks of what we’re trying to order. I understand the confusion but it’s based on a false premise that only vegans would want vegan food. I actually flagged up years ago that Zizzi have served us meat-containing food (on our request) with a label saying ‘vegan’ as is their default when a ‘vegan’ option is chosen is a bit crazy. The kids were all a little cranky at lunch – a combination of excited for a following birthday party and slightly grumpy after having been caught in the cross fire of two stressed parents trying to frantically tidy around them. As such it was hard just to keep them all sat up at the table, let along concentrating on food, so I didn’t really think when the pizza turned up without a vegan label. I half wondered whether they don’t do that any more for food that isn’t actually vegan. (Strike 2).

Towards the end of the meal, as we were trying to encourage the two mobile children to decide whether they were definitely finished rather than distracted; I decided to share a bit of the Pizza with Dragon and she also offered some to mummy. I didn’t notice anything about the pizza at first but my wife commented that it seemed ‘cheesier’ than usual. I agreed and actually the texture of the cheese was quite a bit firmer than we’re used to with vegan cheese. It’s worth pointing out that that vegan cheeses vary quite a bit anyway so the cheese at Pizza Express is definitely different to that at Zizzi and other places. And none of us eat real mozzarella any more to know how it should taste. So we each had a few mouthfuls before coming to a shared consensus that something wasn’t right.

I caught our waiter’s attention and asked him just to confirm that the pizza Dragon had been given was in fact a vegan one. He swiftly confirmed that it was. He explained that he’d asked the manager and that the pizzas were vegan and that we had nothing to worry about. Unfortunately his explanation was that ‘the kids pizzas are vegan’ which clearly isn’t the case for non-vegan, i.e. standard, pizzas. Again, I didn’t pick up as quickly as I should have that this answer wasn’t really satisfactory. Having discussed it after he’d left we decided none of us would have any more but the kids we basically finished anyway.

I stewed over it a little bit more: uncomfortable with the explanation but also lacking conviction to challenge it further. Beside which Dragon, my wife and I had all eaten it by now so the damage was done if it was milk and there was nothing else that could be done. I’m embarrassed that as someone who blogs about these experiences and is reasonably well experienced at dealing with allergy conversations, I still struggle to strike a balance between my need to have food suitable for our various allergies and my appetite for confrontation. Even in my most frustrating experiences I have very rarely chosen to display my anger – aware that the responsibilities of the institute (i.e. Zizzi as a company) and the human limitations of the person serving us are not the same thing.

The final straw was on getting checking the bill and seeing just ‘3-kids meals’ as the level of detail of what had been ordered but seeing in parallel that the online bill if you wanted to checkout directly at the table (i.e. scan a QR code and pay on your phone without interacting further with a waiter) showed the order as “Kids margarita + ham”. There’s no way that a vegan pizza would be processed through Zizzi’s order system as just a normal margarita and so from that point I was sure that some misunderstanding had happened. Perhaps foolishly, my only desire at that point was to get confirmation as to whether we’d all eaten cows milk or not. It seemed very likely to me but at least if we knew we could use that information to our advantage: If Dragon doesn’t have any symptoms then we can take that as positive that she appears to have grown out of the allergy (we mean to re-test periodically even if it’s uncomfortable to do so). Whereas if we didn’t know for certain a positive test for symptoms would only confirm what we suspected, while a negative test for symptoms might just mean that she hadn’t had milk.

We opted to pack up the kids and send them on ahead with my wife while I hung back to press the issue further. It took a little while to get the waiter to have the conversation and I was still apologetic about pressing the issue further, but explained that the online bill had once again made me doubt that the pizza cheese was vegan. Eventually he was able to get the manager and they went through the order on the system and spoke to the kitchen. They explained that (as suspected) the order had not been put through as a vegan margarita and we had in fact all had real mozzarella. They were apologetic but matter of fact: the waiter was new and there had been a misunderstanding about what we had ordered. I felt compelled to tell them that it wasn’t a life threatening issue but was at least firm enough to correct the manager when he said with relief that it was “just an intolerance then…”. But at least they eventually checked and told us the truth and while I was frustrated that we had checked earlier and been fobbed off – the truth was we’d all eaten it by that point and hadn’t eaten any more after.

There are a couple of takeaway (no pun intended – my pun enthusiasm levels are quite low today) points to consider on the back of this:

• We need to think seriously about how we communicate our allergens when we eat out. I feel bad reeling off a long list of possible allergens when we don’t know how serious each one actually is but the fact that I don’t even mention peanut for myself which I clearly should do means that I need to find a way to get more comfortable with stating my requirements. There must be ways to do it in a way that doesn’t startle the person serving as much as happens today.
• We should have the confidence to re-check food when it comes to the table. Some places are brilliant and will make a real point of reconfirming allergen requests when they bring food out but at least on meals where there’s a with or without choice to be made that isn’t visually obvious there is no harm in just asking someone to confirm that it’s vegan cheese etc…
• Zizzi need to look at what set of circumstances led to us getting served cheese after stating allergies up front and then choosing from an allergen menu that accounted for it. I’ve several times asked myself what would we have done differently if our allergies were known to be life threatening. Put bluntly, I’m not sure we should have had to do anything more but I suspect we would have been more careful to emphasis the importance of not having said ingredient but also checking and re-checking before eating that it was OK. I think what happened today was that the waiter thought that all kids pizzas were vegan and was confident enough of that to reconfirm that to us upon us checking. That shows how unfamiliar with the menu our waiter must have been as clearly pizzas in general are not going to be milk free. But also shows holes in the training and allergen safety process that this didn’t flag up as a problem. For example, if all allergen avoiding orders should show up with a label (as we were told should have been the cases if the order was processed correctly) then this should be made clear to anyone ordering with an allergy up front. It certainly doesn’t make sense for the catch-flag to be a ham pizza missing the sticker ‘vegan’.

We haven’t decided what this means for us eating at Zizzi again going forward. We’ve had many good allergen accommodating meals there in the past and I suspect this set of circumstances could well have happened with a very new member of staff at other restaurants – although I hope (and suspect) that there would be catches or processes to avoid this elsewhere. I will certainly be more careful ordering there (and probably in general) going forward. In hindsight, I am a little frustrated that we were simply brushed off with a ‘sorry he’s fairly new’ apology. My best friend – on recounting the story through a series of irate WhatsApp messages shortly after – was appalled that I’d paid full price for the meal but I struggle to work out what would have been appropriate compensation for the mix up. I will almost certainly experience 4-5 days of discomfort now as the milk works its way through my system, although at least knowing in advance that I’ve had milk I can proactively manage that rather than realising late why I’m in pain. My wife will probably experience some lactose intolerance issues given that she’s not allergic but for breastfeeding reasons has been off milk for many years now. It will be interesting to see whether Griffen has any reaction. He didn’t eat any directly but it would have passed through the breastmilk for the other two. Sadly he’s probably still working through the after-effect of his own allergens too much to see an isolated milk affect for the relatively small amount that my wife ate. Although given the lag to get to him, if his symptoms get worse again after clearing up it might give us an idea whether he does react to milk at all. Poor Dragon gets a full-on milk ladder baptism of fire. She will have eaten half the pizza and if her allergies are the same as they were a year or so ago she will have a tough few days. That said, we probably need to test her on her existing allergies at some point so at least this will give us something to go on for whether she’s growing out of them. I wouldn’t have started on 3 slices of cheesy pizza as the first test though! And in fact, already this evening she is complaining of some of the first symptoms so I think it’s unlikely this is going to pass with flying colours. Clearly £65 for that family experience feels like a pretty awful deal but what do you ask Zizzi for instead? The £7 back that we spent on that pizza? A free meal at a future date? It’s hardly going to make me suddenly super positive about the experience. All I really want is to highlight that this has been able to happen and help to avoid it happening to anyone else, particularly where the consequences could be far worse.

I intend to share this blog with Zizzi directly so it will be interesting to see if anything comes of that.

Other than that it’s back to keeping a crazy house as happy as possible, hoping for longer than 4 minute house viewings and hoping that I’ve passed the peak abdominal pain by my birthday in a handful of days…

Toodlepips x

P.S. (can you write postscript in a blog post – feels like a mixed platform metaphor slightly) I know that my nature in dealing with these things might not be the same as everyone elses. I’m not really a ‘shout about it’ kind of person unless I think the specific person I’m dealing with needs a sudden change of direction. But I also feel like I have a certain responsibility in these situations. If you think I clearly should have done something different in this situation please do let me know.