Can you cater for allergies?
What restaurants and cafes need to publish
For a severe allergy this is a safety question, not a preference. An ambiguous answer means they eat somewhere else, and they bring the whole table with them.
How customers actually ask it
The same intent arrives in wording your page probably does not use. All of these mean the same thing:
- “Can you cater for allergies?”
- “is it gluten free”
- “nut allergy”
- “coeliac”
- “dairy free options”
- “allergen information”
What a complete answer contains
For restaurants and cafes specifically, an answer is only complete when it covers all 5:
- 1
Which of the major allergens you can reliably exclude, named individually
- 2
An honest statement about cross-contamination — a shared fryer or a single prep surface must be disclosed
- 3
Whether allergen information is available in writing, and where
- 4
How much notice you need to prepare something safely
- 5
Who to speak to on arrival, so the guest does not have to explain twice
A worked example
Illustrative — not a real business
Our full allergen matrix is on every menu page. We can prepare gluten-free, dairy-free and nut-free dishes on request. Our kitchen is not a nut-free environment and we cannot guarantee against trace cross-contamination — please tell us when booking so the kitchen can prepare accordingly, and mention it again to your server.
Which page should own it
Menu page, with an allergen section
What silence costs
Guests with allergies research before booking and rarely phone. A vague answer removes you from consideration silently, along with everyone dining with them.
More questions restaurants and cafes get
Related
term
What is AI customer service?
AI customer service means answering customer questions with a language model rather than a person. The useful implementations are grounded in a specific business's own content; the poor ones let a general model improvise, which produces confident answers that are wrong.
term
What is a knowledge base?
Traditionally a knowledge base is a help centre humans read. For AI support it is the source material a representative answers from — which means an ordinary website, well written, can serve as one without a separate help centre.
use case
Answer customer questions from your own content
Answering questions well means answering them from something true. RubyRep retrieves the relevant passages from your site before it writes anything, and cites the page it used, so an answer can always be checked.
Does your site answer this already?
Point RubyRep at your website and ask it this exact question. If it cannot answer, neither can your customers.