Not long after I finally got diagnosed with a gluten allergy — it took two years to figure out what was actually wrong with me — I found this video. It’s funny because it’s true.
I’ve had that exact conversation more times than I can count: the concerned head-tilt, the ‘wait, so, like, at all?’, the friend who suddenly remembers a bakery three towns over.
I bring it up not to retell my own diagnosis story, but because the reaction is universal. Swap it for wheat, shellfish, peanuts, milk. Doesn’t matter. Anyone who’s ever had to say ‘I can’t eat that’ out loud has lived some version of that conversation. And everyone on the other side of the table, including now everyone in my kitchen, has had to figure out what to actually do with it.
That’s what this article is about.
What Are the Nine Major Food Allergens?
Milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame. The federal government settled on these nine because together they account for the overwhelming majority of serious food-allergy reactions in the country. Sesame is the newest addition, added in 2023 after Congress found it affected roughly a million and a half Americans and had been hiding for years under vague label language like ‘spices.’
Nine words worth knowing, whether you’re reading a nutrition label or a restaurant menu.
Why These Nine, and Not the Other 160-Some Foods That Can Trigger a Reaction?
The test Congress actually used was prevalence and severity: how many people react, and how badly. Not every allergy is equally common, and not every one carries the same risk of a trip to the ER. The nine on the list cover both ends of that math.
Sesame is the clearest recent example of how the test works. It wasn’t just that more people were being diagnosed. Hospitalizations for food-allergy reactions rose 400 percent over the prior decade, and a quarter of the serious sesame reactions the FDA reviewed came from products that never listed sesame at all. That’s not a labeling inconvenience. That’s someone reading a label in good faith and still ending up in danger.
One detail I like: the bill that added sesame to the list was introduced in the Senate by Tim Scott of South Carolina. Our own senator, putting sesame on the same footing as peanuts and shellfish, years before we opened our doors forty-some miles from his front door.
Does South Carolina Require Restaurants to List Allergens on the Menu?
No. Neither South Carolina nor North Carolina has a law on the books, or even a bill moving through the statehouse, requiring restaurants to disclose the nine allergens on a menu. California passed the first law like this in the country in 2025. New York followed. A handful of other states have bills in progress. The Carolinas aren’t among them — not yet, though I hear from a colleague that some legislators have discussed it.
This article isn’t me describing a compliance requirement. It’s us telling you what we do when nobody’s requiring it.
The Rest of the World Already Does This
The EU has required restaurants to disclose allergen information in writing since 2014. Not verbally. Not a shrug and ‘just ask your server.’ And it covers fourteen allergens, not nine, adding celery, mustard, sulphites, lupin, and molluscs to our list. It’s been the norm across the Atlantic for over a decade.
I happened to experience these numbered allergen systems on menus when I was in Ireland for Fort Mill High School’s performance in the St. Patrick’s Day parade. I really enjoyed how easy it was to eat out there. So when we started making our menu, the chef and I worked on how we could do it too. At some point, maybe we’ll expand beyond the big nine.
How It Actually Works in Our Kitchen
Every item on our menu has numbers after the description, one for each major allergen: wheat, shellfish, eggs, fish, peanuts, soy, milk, tree nuts, sesame. No icons, no fine print to squint at. Tell your server what you’re avoiding, and your table’s ticket gets marked in two places, not one: once on the tab itself, so the allergy prints at the top of everything that fires for your table all night, and again on the specific items you ordered, so the exact plate is flagged too. The redundancy is the point. One system catches the table. The other catches the plate.
From there, it’s up to multiple people to double- and triple-check. The kitchen hears it before your food is built, and nothing leaves the pass until the person running the kitchen that night confirms it. When your plate lands, whoever sets it down says the allergen consideration out loud. You should hear it, not just assume it.
One example, because specifics matter more than promises: Still Water, one of our cocktails, contains egg whites. Easy to miss in a drink. So please mention allergies when you’re ordering drinks too, not just food.
Gluten-friendly, on request, works the same way. That’s deliberate wording, and it means something different than ‘gluten-free.’ More on that below.
What We Can’t Promise, and Why We Say So
Here’s the honest limit: this is a working restaurant kitchen, not a dedicated allergen-free facility. Shared equipment and shared space mean we manage risk — carefully, with a real person confirming at every step. We won’t ever say we have zero cross-contact. It wouldn’t be responsible to tell you a dish is ‘safe’ or ‘allergen-free’ just to make the conversation easier. That’s why it’s ‘gluten-friendly,’ not ‘gluten-free.’ On request, we’ll leave an ingredient out of a dish if we can, but we’re not claiming an allergen-free kitchen, because that’s not a promise we can actually keep.
A guarantee we can’t keep is worse than an honest limit we can.
That might seem like a strange thing to volunteer in an article meant to put you at ease. But the nine numbers beside your dish, the ticket marked twice, someone saying it out loud when your food arrives — that’s what we can actually do. We’d rather you trust the real thing than a nicer-sounding promise. We want to give you the facts, so you’re informed and can make the best decision for yourself.
That video still makes me laugh, because the head-tilt is real. But the version of that conversation we actually want for you is the boring one: you tell us what you’re avoiding, we mark it twice, someone says it out loud when your plate lands, and you eat. No head-tilt required.
That’s the good life we’re trying to gather people into. Nine allergens is just where it starts.