The Millstone – A Dedicated Gluten Free Menu with Food Allergy Work-Ability

The Millstone restaurant is a beautiful two level restaurant located in the heart of Dublin city on Dame St (Dublin 2). The restaurant is traditionally decorated like so many old-fashioned restaurants on the continent and has a warm and cozy feel which is encouraged with live music every night of the week. The music we had last night (Sunday) was classical guitar with female vocals singing songs like ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ and a soft version of ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’.
The Millstone gets a lot of tourists due to its central location and large servings which is always nice after a long day of sight-seeing and city walking so note that it does begin to fill up quickly from 6pm onwards, even in these recessional times. But of course, our real interest at Survival Guide is how they cater to food allergies...

Our dinner party consisted of myself and my food allergies, my sister who is dairy free and avoids gluten and my father who is allergy free – someone in our family had to be lucky!

Gluten free options are a lovely thing but an especially dedicated Gluten Free menu is quite an amazingly lovely thing! And yes, that is just what the Millstone offers. The other lovely thing is that the menu says right on the top of the 1st page that if you have food allergies to let the staff know - I like this.

So, we easily worked around our dairy intolerances and picked dishes that suited my other multiple issues.
The really nice thing about the gluten free menu for me is that it’s almost the same length as the regular menu and they even have a ‘Coeliac Traditional Irish Set Menu’ to choose from which has some of your favourite Irish meals like:

- Seafood Chowder
- Irish Salmon dishes
- Steamed Mussels
- Irish Stew
- Slow Roast Lamb Belly
- Vegetable & Goats Cheese Potato Pie

And also, desserts like Homemade Apple Flan on a gluten free sponge or homemade Bailey’s Crème Brulée! -obviously not dairy free on either account but still impressive.

There are also pizzas made with a homemade gluten free pizza dough. I had the Thai Curry Pizza with the Thai Vegetable option which was alright depending on how long it had been since you had a normal pizza. I of course had this without cheese due to my allergy to cow’s milk (but I really like cheese-less pizzas, even if I had the option!). The pizza base didn’t really wow me as it was fairly dense and you could definitely taste the baking powder but my sister had the Gluten Free Chicken & Prawn Piri-Piri which wowed the socks off her!

Also, as an additional note, my Dad had a steak which came with a massive juicy mushroom and thick soft onions. He gets steak almost everywhere he goes - too long in Canada I imagine ;) - but my sister and I can vouch with our hands on our hearts that The Millstone steak was the TASTIEST looking steak we have ever seen. And on top of that, it was also the thickest steak that we have even seen in Ireland! - and remember, he gets steak everywhere so we’ve seen our fair share of steaks!

So the lowdown is: if you’re Gluten free you will have an entire menu to choose from at the Millstone restaurant on Dame St and if you have some other type of food allergy the staff welcomes the knowledge and will help you work around your allergy the best they can, despite not having dedicated menus for everything. Note: the full menus for dinner, lunch & brunch (main menu & coeliac menu) are available on their website

Millstone Restaurant
39 Dame Street
Dublin 2
Tel: 01 679 9931
Web: www.millstonerestaurant.ie
Opening Times: Sun – Thurs 10:30-23:00; Fri – Sat 10:30-23:30