Our Story

We are all in this together!

Why does AllergyEats exist?  AllergyEats set out to solve a simple problemhow can food-allergic and food-intolerant diners quickly and easily find restaurants that will properly accommodate their individual dietary needs?  Our Founder, Paul Antico, knew first-hand the struggles in attempting to do so.  His family of 7, with 3 food-allergic children, would often have to seek dining options for up to an hour or more when traveling – whether in big cities or small towns.  Even upon finding restaurants that were welcoming to his family, Paul still knew they were making relatively uninformed, hit-or-miss restaurant choices.  There had to be a better way.

15 million Americans live with food allergies or intolerances – and virtually all want to dine out.  Dining out is such an essential part of our social fabric that finding a way to do so as safely as possible is a problem that needs a solution.  So what if we all got together and helped each other?  What if we all shared our dining out experiences for the benefit of everyone else in our food allergy community, and they did the same thus benefitting us?  But how would the logistics work?  How could we “hear” what everyone was saying?

Enter AllergyEats.

AllergyEats has become the dominant guide to finding allergy-friendly restaurants across the United States – whether using a phone, tablet, or computer.  AllergyEats is a peer-reviewed directory of restaurants, meaning that the key to AllergyEats’ value is YOU!  You rate restaurants for the benefit of others.  The restaurant ratings process is quick and simple, and focuses only on a restaurant’s allergy-friendliness – not its cuisine, price, or ambiance (we’ll leave that to others).  We make it easy for you to rate restaurants and we make it easy for users to see which restaurants others have loved… or not.  It is this simple, user-friendly design and functionality that has made AllergyEats so popular, loved and trusted in the food allergy community since our launch in early 2010.

Despite winning many awards, we constantly strive for continuous improvement of our app and website.  Your feedback is so important to this process and we listen.  We’re always finding new ways to improve the functionality, features, and customization of AllergyEats, all while maintaining our trademark simple, user-friendly design and ratings process.  We have over 850,000 restaurants in our database, ready for you to rate.  In many of our restaurant listings, besides our allergy-friendliness ratings and user comments, we also include menus, website links, OpenTable reservation links, restaurant allergen commitment statements, one-touch phone numbers, maps & directions, and more.  We look forward to consistently improving AllergyEats for you, particularly with the support of your feedback.

We hope you enjoy our suite of offerings, from our “core” U.S. restaurant database, to our Disney World guide, our New York City (Manhattan) guide, award-winning AllergyEats Blog, and popular social media forums.  Most importantly, we hope you find allergy-friendly restaurants that you come to love wherever you are, thanks to the food-allergic diners who rated those restaurants on AllergyEats before you.  Our base of ratings is robust and growing fast… but we still need your help and your input to make AllergyEats ever more valuable to our community.

So find, rate, and share a restaurant today – your voice matters to all of us.  We are all in this together!