The Artisan Farmer

CELIACS AND FOOD ALLERGIES BEWARE - We had phoned ahead to ascertain if level of advertised ‘GF’ menu items would be suitable for our child who has celiac disease. Friendly lady on the phone quickly assured me they cater for celiacs, stating they take care to make a fresh toasty by wrapping the gluten free ham and cheese with GF bread, inside baking paper, clean set of gloves and GF designated tongs. (Sounded good until....) When having arrived and started ordering, I was told by the register staff that the restaurant was too busy to prepare GF food unless it was ordered from the menu (ie: an adult burger etc - more expensive item. But my 7yo wouldn’t have eaten any if their very limited 3 adult meal options.) When I explained that I was told on the phone it would be no problem to prepare the toasty from scratch her response was ‘I don’t know who you spoke to but we don’t do that when it’s busy and we can’t guarantee our GF items are GF, there are traces of gluten in everything because we just swap out the standard gluten bread for GF bread and it’s touched the same things.’ It was extremely hard for me to then get clarification from her if they actually take an existing sandwich with gluten bread and just replace the bread with GF bread using the filling that was previously in contact with the initial unsafe gluten bread. I tried to ask another way- Q1: ‘For Celiacs, are you able to prepare a fresh sandwich in a seperate area?’ Ans1: ‘NO’ Q2: Are you able to use a clean pair of gloves and clean tongs?’ Ans2: ‘No, we’re too busy for that. Q3: ‘Can you please check with the people making the food if they can do that because I was told on the phone that you can do that. She disappeared and returned to say ‘we can do that.’. 🤦🏼‍♀️ No apology though. I was still very nervous this person was diligent & confident enough for the job, so asked if she could please make a note on the order that it was a ‘celiac meal’. She then asked me to spell Celiac. At that stage my child got very scared that she was about to be fed a gluten meal and asked if we could drive somewhere else. TERRIBLE SERVICE! The manager wasn’t much better tbh. She started explaining to me that they don’t guarantee GF because they bake all the bread in-house on the same equipment. In shock & me wondering what they actually understand about gluten at all I query ‘Do you bake the gluten free bread on the same equipment as your gluten bread?!’ And she finally tells me ‘oh, for gluten free bread we order it in.’🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️ I take a deep breath, full of stress and ask her again, ‘you did put our order down as a celiac toasty on gluten-free bread, yes?’. She says ‘Yes’. We still don’t know how they prepared our child’s food and will have to just watch for symptoms and hope we don’t end up with a 6wk recovery. The whole experience, apart from being extremely unnecessarily stressful and traumatic especially for my 7yo, was full of rudeness from the first person, including eye-rolling and smirking. Unprofessional incompetent service and inconsistent information. Such a shame, I really wanted to like this place & for it to become our new regular pit stop. Overpriced, dirty table, poor service, untrained rude staff, dirty toilets, no soap or toilet paper and when asked for soap soap the manager said they had run out, ‘still waiting for the supplier.’ 👎👎👎👎👎

Finally, a perfect place to stop along the highway. Delicious food and coffee, huge variety of food including gluten free options. The cafe has a lovely atmosphere and very clean. Lovely friendly staff too

A bit expensive but food great, gluten free options available