As this writer has moaned for years, “All I want is a real piece of bread!”
It’s early summer, and the table is set in the garden. The guests arrive and sit down and begin to pass the green salads with croutons, the sourdough baguettes and the rectangles of pizza-like, herbed, Portobello squares that nobody’s ever seen before. You wait, smiling. This is a test. Your friends are “normal people.” Will they guess the meal is “gluten free”?
To those who may wonder at the term, “gluten free” is a must for people who, for a variety of health reasons or preferences, need to avoid or completely eliminate wheat or gluten (a protein in wheat, barley and some other grains) from their diet. For “gluten free people,” the basic American diet is pretty much anathema, with not only breads, cereals, pastries and pastas on the “no” list, but also all the foods that contain hidden wheat, such as soy sauce, ketchup, gravies, many prepared soups and now even some tortillas. Until recently, among us gluten free people, the words “baguette” or “pizza,” would conjure feelings of longing tinged with misery—all those delights were forbidden, unless the gluten free person should be received into a heaven where, as this writer has moaned for years, “all I want is a real piece of bread!”
Well, pass the baguettes!
At last, that heaven is right here in the North Bay. Now, in Marin, Sonoma and Napa counties, the gluten free crowd can enjoy a restaurant meal with family and friends without sulking, feeling left out or having to beg the server, with eyes like someone on a UNICEF poster, “Don’t you have anything gluten free?”
The heart of a gluten free baker
Exploring the world of the gluten free is to meet people who understand the pain of being left out of the party. They believe food is about sharing, family and, yes, love. Debra Baretta boasts that, with a father from Torino, Italy, and a mother with two Italian parents, she’s “100 percent Italian!” What’s more, she was born into the world of baking. Her late father owned Cunio Bakery in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood and had always encouraged her to join the business, but she declined, thinking it would be too much work. Later, married with three small children and a career as an airline flight attendant, she found her middle son suffering from multiple food allergies, but particularly an allergy to wheat. This brought about a family crisis: What could an Italian family do without bread and pasta?
Mama Baretta is born
In a small rental space, she experimented and finally came up with recipes involving organic brown rice, tapioca, flax meal, organic rice milk and organic cornmeal. “I made cinnamon raisin bread and my version of French bread. I made pizza crust. And then I started making cookies, and the kids would say, ‘Oh my God, your cookies are better than the school’s!’”
“I just had a specific intention: organic, non-GMO, very good food—the kind your mother or grandmother would make, but without wheat, soy, most without eggs and without peanuts.”
In 2013, she won second place in the Startup Nation’s Leading Moms in Business Competition, and her sales were $115,000 for the year. She says she took home around 25 percent profit on average, between retail and wholesale. It was a struggle, balancing the kids, the airline job, the hours and the cost, but it was one she loved. Then, last year, when her landlord doubled her rent on the kitchen space, she was forced to close. “I put my heart and soul into this,” she says. “Everything I had.”
She still gets calls from people wondering where they can find her bread, and can’t bear to take her website down yet. Whether she’s closed for good or will return when circumstances improve, she proved—to herself, her son and her customers—that a gluten free life can include all the goodies even a kid could want.
Another Italian, Nancy DeLorenzo, owner of Wild Goat Bistro in Petaluma, also bases her business on a philosophy that says food is about sharing and no one at the table should feel left out. Anyone stepping into her intimate and atmospheric European bistro, with its open kitchen and exposed stone walls, will experience the warmth of welcome and an expectation of delight. Once seated, as plates of rich pizzas, piled-high burgers and towering sandwiches start going by—all gluten free—you may blink and find yourself thinking, “I’m in heaven.”
Nancy, grounded in her sense of the fundamental place food has in a culture, opened Wild Goat in 2010 with no thought of gluten in mind. “But people started coming in asking for gluten free options,” she says. At first, she wondered what they were asking. Then, when people explained to her their restrictions and how hard it was to enjoy food with everyone else, she—having been a vegetarian most of her life—knew exactly what it was like to be the odd one at the table: Not good. After a while, after listening to and identifying with her customers’ symptoms, she had herself tested and—surprise!—she proved to be gluten intolerant, too.
A catastrophe for an Italian. “I love pizza, I love eating out, and I love bread!” she says. “So realizing I needed to be gluten free was just a nightmare.” But, like Baretta, she got busy. “Luckily,” she says, “I had my own restaurant. So we just made a commitment to make anything we do gluten free, so our regular customers and our gluten free customers always feel safe eating here. That’s our main goal.”
For a gluten free person sitting down to a summer lunch, her menu poses a novel problem: Not, as usually is the case, “Is there anything here I can eat?” But, “How can I decide, when I can have everything?”
We chose the pizza, as it’s the most challenging gluten free food to make great. What arrived was beautiful and as good as any pizza we’d ever had. Delicate Mediterranean flavors of pesto, artichoke, olives, mozzarella and a crust so crisp and delicate you could eat the whole thing. The secret of the crust, she explains, is in how the dough is treated and baked—too little, and it’s mushy; too long, and it’s cardboard. For dessert, while the carrot cake looked fantastic, we chose a chocolate cake with raspberry sauce that was so light and moist, and not too sweet, that it, too, left nothing to be desired…except room for more.
We wondered how, knowing that gluten free items in the store tend to be expensive, if it’s this good, with ingredients so fresh, can the restaurant be profitable? Nancy smiles. “We’ve been seeing a 22 percent increase since day one,” she says. “We haven’t stopped. When you do gluten free, you get a very loyal customer base.” We said we’d be back, and meant it.
In Marin, at the Miracle Mile Café, Ginger Sandoval feeds her gluten free community (along with everyone else) the most “yummy” plates she can conjure up. To see what she could do with brunch, we dropped in on a Sunday—and we weren’t alone. The line to get in the door wound around the building. From the aroma inside, we were happy to wait. While we did, Edwin, Sandoval’s husband (who’d come in that morning to help out) put a plate of something like a cinnamon swirl with maple syrup on the table for us to share, “a present,” he said, smiling.
While others at our table stuck with breakfast, ordering the eggs Benedict on gluten free biscuits, we choose the grass-fed burger and, for the first time in years, bit into actual, very delicious, total hamburger, complete with gluten free bun.
Sandoval has owned the restaurant for two and a half years. She used to be a server there, and then, as the restaurant was heading into a decline, bought it and turned it around. She started by listening to her customers. “People would be asking for gluten free toast for breakfast, and I didn’t have any,” she says. “So I looked on the Internet for recipes but didn’t like the ingredients. I thought, ‘I wonder if I could just make it myself.’ So I tried biscuits.” She began serving biscuits with her omelettes and everything else fell into place. Her philosophy of food is simple, but the reality is complex.
“Food should be yummy,” she says. “It should be something to talk about at the dinner table. It should create shared memories with your dining companions.” She pauses a moment. “Like in my family,” she says, “we have all these ’tarians.’ One sister’s a vegetarian, another is a vegetarian but will eat barbecued chicken, a third is a pescatarian, and then there’s someone who was vegetarian but now can’t do that because she’s lactose intolerant. So for every meal, we always have all these separate little meals going.” In her own restaurant, as at her family table, she wants there to be “something for everyone.”
But custom food is like custom anything: expensive. “I had a friend who brought in a bag of gluten free pancake mix, and it was wonderful,” she says. “But when I went to buy a bag, it was like $26!” So she decided to tool around herself and came up with her own recipe for pancakes and waffles. People liked them. After that, it was biscuits and gravy. “Nobody makes gluten free biscuits and gravy anywhere!” she laughs and says her gluten free gravy is better than regular.
She loves the challenge of meeting specific needs. “In Iowa,” where she’s from, “the only modifications you’ll hear are, ‘No onions, and hold the pickle.’ I never knew you could even ask for anything different!” She laughs. “In Marin, you can have 300 things on the menu and still, people can’t order without making an exception.” But for her, that’s just like home. “When you come to my restaurant, I want it to be like you’ve come to my home.”
Speaking of home
Back to the lunch in the garden. As the baguette is passed around, people are saying, “Gluten free? How can this be?” And, “But it’s delicious!” And, “But what’s in this?” And, “I’d never have known!” Then, you reveal from beneath the picnic table the carry-out bags from Napa’s C Casa and Cate & Co., a quick-serve restaurant, bakery and sandwich shop in the Oxbow Public Market. All the fare in both places is 100 percent gluten free and also—as befits Napa Valley’s reputation for culinary excellence—fresh, and with grass-fed meats, free-range chickens, fresh fish flown in daily and amazing and fascinating sauces and seasonings.
C Casa was opened in 2010 by Catherine Bergen, whose previous ventures included Tulocay and Company and Made in Napa Valley, a line of shelf-stable sauces, flavored oils, vinegars and rubs. This latest enterprise started as just a great, all-fresh, gourmet taco quick-serve restaurant. Bergen wasn’t even thinking “gluten free” at the start, wanting only to use “fresh, white corn tortillas made to order and the freshest ingredients,” she says. “The meats and fish are grilled to order and lots of fresh produce.”
She got much of her inspiration for her menu from growing up in San Diego and spending time in Baja. She also travelled through Mexico and came to love Latin culture and cuisine, and spent time with Mexican cuisine specialist Chef Rick Bayless. Once launched, Catherine met a surprise. “Everyone kept saying, ‘You’re a gluten free restaurant!’ and I said, ‘I don’t even know what gluten is!’”
Going with the flow
When the Celiac Community Foundation of Northern California contacted her, Bergen invited them to come examine her kitchen. They looked at everything and pulled only three ingredients (fish sauce, soy sauce and dry mustard, which all contain wheat) and then C Casa became a 100 percent gluten free restaurant. “People were thanking me, and I’m thinking, ‘This is really cool! I’m doing what I love and I’m helping people be able to eat great food!’”
With C Casa going strong, people started asking for desserts. Bergen had only a terrific gluten free olive oil cake and a Mexican brownie until a young CIA graduate named Maggie Rice approached her, saying, “I’m celiac, and I could be your baker!” They worked on recipes together for a year and, now, Cate & Co., just a few paces from C Casa in the Oxbow Public Market, is selling out its breads, cakes, cookies, granolas, sandwiches, salads, melts and pizza-like treats to the point where, Bergen says, they’re getting ready to launch a direct-to-consumer program that will send their products all over the country.
“I don’t know how it happened,” she says, wonderingly. “I’ve just been directed, open and fluid. I listen to my customers.” And what about the gluten angle for her, personally? “It’s not that I’m a die-hard gluten free person, but I just feel better when I don’t eat so much gluten,” she says. “But the main thing is I’m helping so many people!”
Gluten free people are grateful
For all the purveyors of gluten free food, there seems to be a primal satisfaction beyond the normal business rewards. They love providing good, healthy, usually organic, always fresh and local food, free of the substance that’s traditionally been essential to baking, but that bothers so many of their customers. They love the challenge. They love the personal rewards. And the success of their restaurants indicates the gratitude of their customers who now find a local restaurant where they and their friends can eat well. Yet another reason to love living in the North Bay.
To Be or Not to Be Gluten Free
It’s not within the scope of this article to examine the diagnostic details of the three main gluten-avoidance categories. But here’s a brief breakdown. Gluten free people fall in three categories: those with celiac disease; those who are gluten sensitive; and those who have a wheat allergy.
The Mayo Clinic describes celiac as an autoimmune disease triggered by eating gluten, which causes inflammation of the small intestine leading to an inability to process nutrients. The Clinic says the disease is four times more prevalent than it was 60 years ago and estimates that about 1 in 100 people in the United States have celiac disease.
Wheat allergy is different from celiac disease. It generates an allergy-causing antibody to the proteins found in wheat, creating symptoms ranging from rash, asthma, depression, headache to anaphylaxis.
Gluten intolerance is more like celiac than allergy, in that it affects the gastrointestinal system. But it’s less serious and doesn’t involve an immune system reaction.
Questionable gluten sensitivity
A 2001 study published in the American Journal of Gastroentology showed that gluten consumption could cause gastrointestinal distress even in persons without celiac disease but who are sensitive to gluten. But a more recent study, published in 2013, found that while patients with non-celiac gluten sensitivity did exhibit symptoms of gastrointestinal distress during the study, it appeared that gluten was not the isolated cause.
When in doubt, see your doctor. Diagnosing celiac requires blood tests and possibly an intestinal biopsy. An allergy test will tell if you have wheat allergy and personal experience will tell you if you feel better or not when you eliminate wheat and gluten.
Resources
Interest in gluten and its effects—and how to avoid them if you need to—is now widespread. See Gluten Free NorCal on Google Maps for a visual image of the spread of gluten free businesses in the wider North Bay Area.
For a wealth of information, try the Celiac Community Foundation of Northern California at www.celiaccommunity.org.
For support, The Gluten Intolerance Group can be found at www.gluten.net.
For gluten free restaurants in Napa and Sonoma counties, check out www.findmeglutenfree.com/us/ca/sonoma.
For a gluten free travel guide, you’ll find The Gluten Free Travel Site at glutenfreetravelsite.com.
