The gluten question, answered on the page

On the page

On the dish, not a legend

The marks ride beside the dish in small type, next to the price, wherever that dish sits. Not a legend at the bottom of the page, not a key of symbols somebody has to scroll back up to decode, and not a separate document nobody opens on a phone.

Because it is text and not a picture of a menu, a phone set to another language translates it, a screen reader reads it out loud, and a search engine can read what you serve. A photograph of a chalkboard does none of those three.

What you actually type

Seven marks, twenty-four characters each

Here is the whole mechanism, because it is smaller than people expect. A dish carries up to eight tags of twenty-four characters. The first one is its course — Starters, Mains — so seven are left for marks. There is no icon set, no vocabulary and no checklist.

Twenty-four characters is a mark, not a statement: Vegan fits, Contains sesame fits, and a sentence about a shared fryer does not. That belongs on the line under the dish, which takes 240 characters, or in the one line of small print you write under the whole menu.

It is free text on purpose, and that cuts both ways. You can write No gluten in the dish rather than gluten free, which is the more honest phrase and the one most kitchens want. You can also write it three different ways on three dishes, and nothing will stop you.

The part we cannot do

A website is not a kitchen

Nothing on the page is verified. Clay does not know your bakery changed the brioche or that the new sauce has fish in it, and it will keep printing what you typed until somebody edits it. That is a person's job, and it wants doing on a schedule rather than when a guest notices.

It is also not compliance. Rules differ by country and change, none of them are satisfied by a web page, and this is not legal advice. Whatever your own rules ask of you — the folder at the counter, the named person on shift, the written statement — keep doing it exactly as you do now.

What the page changes is the volume. The question gets asked at the door because there was nowhere else to ask it; published, it moves to a phone at nine the night before, and what arrives at the door instead is somebody who has already decided to come.