Dinner at my friend Michelle Li’s Toronto home had always been a highly coveted invitation. The menu was usually a mystery and always a delight. She’d greet you with platters of appetizers: shrimp toast or homemade Jamaican patties or red snapper ceviche. Later in the evening, she’d serve shepherd’s pie or chicken and waffles or hand-pulled noodles.
As spoiled as we felt at her table, Li always insisted the pleasure was hers – a justification to splurge on ingredients or experiment with new culinary techniques. Every dinner party was like a blank canvas for her creative expression.
But that creativity has been stifled in the past few years.
She now routinely plans menus that are gluten-free, vegan and keto-friendly, while also taking into consideration the finicky preferences of her friends and their children. She feels pressure to make vegetarian versions of every meat dish she cooks, to keep complicated mental lists of what her friends’ kids will eat and to share her menu plans ahead of time. Sometimes, someone will ask that she go easy on the seasoning, or not do a hard sear on protein because their child prefers “light browning” only.
“The Venn diagram of what you can make that everyone will enjoy is so small,” Li told me. “It feels like the culture of dietary lifestyle has evolved into a superbug strain.”
Globally, rates of food allergies and celiac disease are increasing, as is adherence to restrictive diets for ethical, health or weight-loss reasons. Restaurants have come a long way in catering to these trends; more are marking which menu items are plant-based or allergen-free and welcoming substitutions. But the expectation that guests can always be accommodated has also extended to meals prepared at home. As a result, throwing a dinner party has never been a more stressful affair.
Edmontonian Mai Nguyen, a frequent dinner party host and private chef, said the list of restrictions she receives from clients are sometimes so long she has to push back.
“For private dinners, the point is everybody has to have the same meal,” she said. If clients expect a choice between several options for each course, “you might as well go to a restaurant.”
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She tries her best to be accommodating. If someone has a dairy allergy, she’ll design a few courses for everyone that are naturally dairy-free. If there’s a shellfish allergy, she’ll prepare her famous scallop crudo with salmon or tuna instead.
But she draws the line at vegan food.
While dumplings are her specialty, she cooks a lot of other dishes that heavily feature meat and seafood, such as tuna tartare, duck breast bao and beef pressed sushi.
“Vegan is just so restrictive for me, where I’m not having fun cooking any more,” she said.
Increasingly, she fields requests that reveal pickiness – aversions to certain ingredients or spices that have nothing to do with allergies. With paying clients, she’ll always try to make it work, she said. “But when it comes to my friends, I’m comfortable with just being like, ‘Grow up.’”
Madhura Shetty, who runs the Toronto supper club Evenings with Moké, theorizes that the expectation to be accommodated has grown out of the shift toward hypercustomization at restaurants. That pan-fried pork chop is served with a kale salad but you’d prefer mashed potatoes? Just request a swap. The fish curry is made with mackerel, which you find to be “too fishy”? Ask for it with halibut instead.
When Shetty launched her supper club three years ago, there’d be the occasional vegetarian guest, or someone with a nut allergy.
“These days, there’s a much wider spectrum from allergies, medical dietary restrictions, to lifestyle diets like keto, paleo, all of that,” she said.
The assumption that menus can be customized at the last minute sometimes comes in the form of an e-mail from one of her 18 guests.
One such note landed at 11 p.m. the night before a dinner that was to include coconut shrimp curry. It said, “Hey, I forgot to mention that I’m allergic to shellfish.” Shetty placed a grocery delivery order and woke up at 4 a.m. to whip up a dish with eggplant instead.
“There have been a lot of times, on the morning of, when I’m remaking everything.”
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She always figures it out, she says, “because at the end of the day, they are our customers, and they have to leave feeling fulfilled and happy in every way.”
Last-minute declarations of dietary restrictions have become so commonplace for private chef Maddy Goldberg that she arrives at her Toronto clients’ houses anticipating them. In a way, they’ve forced her to become a more creative cook.
She has go-tos that seem to work for almost any diet: vegan potato pavé, beet salad with dairy-free tahini dressing and gluten-free risotto. But in case she has to improvise a dish on the spot, she carries an emergency kit full of allergen-friendly flavour builders: homemade chive oil, specialty vinegars and expensive salt. Once, for a guest who couldn’t eat a pasta sauce made with cream and butter, she whipped up a replacement using short rib jus, chive oil and fresh herbs.
Chef Jannell Lo used to work in restaurant kitchens where requests to accommodate guests with allergies were received with disdain, but she’s seen that culture evolve – and her thinking has, too.
This month, the Vancouver-based, French-trained chef will release her first cookbook, My Best Friend is Gluten-Free, in which she’s modified many of her favourite East and Southeast Asian dishes – from zhaijiangmian (Chinese minced pork noodles) to mapo tofu – to make them gluten-free. Many of the recipes also have a dairy-free, plant-based and pescatarian option. Her inspiration was her husband, who has celiac disease, and the desire to make him and anyone with a restrictive diet feel welcome at her table.
For hosts who feel overwhelmed juggling many dietary restrictions, she said even small tweaks can often make dishes work – for example, keeping okonomiyaki (Japanese savoury pancakes) on the menu but replacing the wheat flour batter with rice flour to make it gluten-free. When guests ask what they can bring, she suggests assigning them an allergen-friendly dish.
“It’s a level of care when hard restrictions come up, but they’re definitely doable,” she said. “I think it’s just a thoughtful way of putting yourself in that person’s shoes and understanding what they have to go through day-to-day.”
A similar empathy helps my cousin-in-law Nooshin Sobhani rise to the challenge when hosting family dinners at her Dartmouth home. In her clan, veganism, gout, diabetes, the keto diet and intermittent fasting are all at play.
A decade ago, as a vegetarian, she had the most high-maintenance diet in the extended family. At dinner parties she’d fill her plate with salad, worried that she’d cause a scene or make her hosts uncomfortable if she told them about her dietary restrictions. Now, she never wants her guests to feel the same way, even if that means extra work.
As the most talented baker in the family, she was tasked with making a birthday cake for her dad last fall, an assignment she’d normally relish. But it had to be plant-based and gluten-free, so she turned to one of her go-to recipes: a joyless almond-flour cake she describes as a “flat, grainy, goopy thing” with no structure, its crumb marred by chia seeds (which serve as an egg replacement). The dairy-free whipped coconut cream frosting can’t be piped, so she spreads it haphazardly with a fork.
“It’s not fun to make,” she said begrudgingly, “but it makes their day.”
