Sunny days keeping hunger at bay

I fully expect to have a tough time finding suitable food options when I'm in a place like a theme park, where it's a great inconvenience to leave the premises for a meal. Therefore, it's so nice to find a family-friendly tourist attraction that caters to celiacs. On visits to Sesame Place in Langhorne, Pa., it certainly surprised me.

"Allergy-friendly" eateries are noted on maps of the park, which is a short drive from Trenton. In addition to gluten-free, they offer special items for visitors with peanut and dairy allergies. While the menu isn't new, it's expanding and its' good for parents with young children to know.


Over the last couple of years, I've eaten the freshly-cooked gluten-free pizzas multiple times. The select dining establishments also offers salads and bunless burgers, and I recently noticed that the gluten-free options have grown to include a variety of grab-and-go light meals and pre-packaged snacks.

Anytime I've ordered the pizza, I've been told it would take 10-15 minutes to cook and waited longer than that. There have been dining staff that didn't know what it was when I ordered it, but others who were knowledgeable about gluten-free products have always stepped in. The park has a lot of young, seasonal workers - high school and college students -  and I get the impression "gluten-free" just isn't familiar to most of them. There's a learning curve, and they get an "A" for effort from me.

In one case, a pizza took 25 minutes to come out, only to be burnt around the edges and frozen solid in the middle. The staff apologized and cooked a new pizza. They expressed concern that the first one had already been taken off its protective foil pan, leaving it exposed to cross-contamination. (That attention to such an important detail made me happy.) In the end, I received my meal about 45 minutes after it was ordered. The staff did seem genuinely concerned about my experience, and provided me with an unsolicited free beverage and souvenir straw for my daughter, which she loved.

It may have been the starvation speaking, but I thought the pizza was wonderful. It may not be comparable to your favorite traditional pizza (it IS gluten-free, after all), but it is a decent, thin-crust pizza. It's served as a filling personal size with a disposable wheel for cutting it into small slices.

Even Oscar the Grouch would have approved.