Great Place In Tn

[floridanative]

Over the weekend we were in Sevierville TN for a family reunion. It was DH's family and surprisingly no one acted as if the gluten free diet was horrible or sad or depressing and someone even brought a bag of caramel candy marked gluten free but I didn't know until after they and the candy left since we had our own gluten free (mostly) cabin with in-laws. Anyway, the only worrisome part of the trip was that we had to go out to dinner at some local place which I figured never heard of Celiac or gluten. I e-mailed them before the trip and they replied in a very knowledgeable way about how they can prepare their on site cut meats or seafood for me safely gluten free and all dressings are made in house and blah, blah. So far so good. But you know that this does not mean your salad will not arrive without croutons (no matter how obnoxious you are about it) once you're actually there in person. We had a private room for our group of 21, with two servers. The male server was on my side of the room and told me that I could get the swordfish without the cajun seasoning, and it would be cooked in a clean pan with olive oil, salt and pepper, they would not cut my potato and would bring s/c and butter on the side and also the asparagus was going to be prepared gluten free and that none of my meal would be dusted with or have flour anywhere near it. He also told me he was pretty sure there was no flour in the Cesear salad dressing (a true recipe does not call for flour) but he said he'd double check to make sure. He arrived back quickly to say that there IS flour in the dressing but they will give me a free house salad with oil/bal. vinegar on the side since they told me I could have the salad at first. They had already made the Cesear which my DH enjoyed. My meal arrived as ordered and was delicious and I did not react. I was blown away that a place in the middle of nowhere TN (sorry if you are from there) knew exactly what I needed to be fed safely, and did just that. I mean TN does not have a no smoking rule in restaurants so they were actually smoking in the bar area. We had a nice enclosed non smoking room for our party but still, it was just such a delightfull surprise to find they could deal with a gluten free meal, and not in a plain, boring way either. There are a few places in Atlanta that could learn a thing or ten from the staff at Puleo's Grill. There are three locations in TN including one in Knoxville. I can only vouch for the Strawberry Plains locale personally.

[spunky]

That's pretty amazing!

We are off to Tennessee in mid-October for DH's family gathering (not quite reunion). We'll be in that same vicinity. Thanks for the info!