Have you ever seen or heard of Nima? Do you know what a Nima is or what it does? "Nima is a portable device used to measure the gluten content of food. Nima’s antibody-based chemistry was developed by MIT scientists to be faster, cheaper, and usable right at the dinner table. Nima is optimized to detect 20ppm of gluten, the FDA "Standard for gluten-free (Nimasensor.com)". It's so easy to use, my 8 year old loves to test foods. 1. Sample a small pea size portion of your food 2. Test your sample 3. Learn if your food sample is gluten free.
Our family owns a Nima gluten sensor and we love it. It has come in handy so many times while traveling, eating at restaurants and even at friends' weddings! You can get your Nima HERE. We were at the ribbon-cutting for Laguna Beach Brewery & Grille, a Modern Mexican Restaurant, as they were celebrating their new brewing system they built from the ground up. It's beautiful, but obviously it's not gluten free beer (they brew after hours while the restaurant is closed); however, they do have a great gluten free beer selection. Their food menu is amazing, but the best part is that if you need something made GF, due to Celiac or allergies, they will take special precautions necessary to accommodate you. Their staff is trained well to know the menu and they also involve the manager to ensure that there is no miscommunication from the server to the kitchen, since passing along this information can be difficult to catch when the chef and his staff are reading it off a small printed ticket. The manager's involvement with my order has been, in my personal experience, an extra safety precaution unlike most other restaurants.
Our order consisted of vegan oyster mushroom ceviche, a mixed green salad with a house made cilantro vinaigrette, vegan tacos with a side of black beans and plain steak tacos for my 8 year old daughter. The corn tortillas are made in house, they also make their own corn tortilla chips that are NOT GF. We were told that they are fried in the same fryer as other non-GF products, but they are nice enough to provide you with gluten free tostadas (but your more than welcome to bring your own as I do). You can find their MENU HERE
pictures of our tasteful and safe foods
testing for gluten in session
vegan tacos and homemade corn tortillas
vegan oyster mushroom ceviche
plain steak tacos on homemade corn tortillas
a side of black beans
mexican rice
All our food was deemed safe by our Nima, but we also took all the necessary precautions needed like: alerting the staff that we had Celiac disease and food allergies. We didn't just rely on our Nima to make sure our food was safe, we spoke up, alerted the staff upon our arrival and handed the manager an allergy chef card that was passed onto the chef. We took all our normal steps to do the best we can to safely eat out, but having Nima to reassure us that our food was safe is a huge relief. That means no waiting and retracing our steps back to what might have made us sick. The Nima app has hundreds of restaurants and packaged foods that have been tested with Nima. Nima has made a huge difference in our life.