1: The background.
A little over a year ago, I had Uni and crab for the first time. It was during a tasting menu with over 10 courses and by the end, I found myself itchy with swollen knuckles.
Around that same time (five days later), I had a similar reaction in a restaurant where a tasting menu featured halibut. This time, I got hives on my shins that lasted for a month. Again, the same thing happened in a tasting menu with barramundi.
As someone who had never had shellfish or either of these fish in her life (yes, ever) before these incidents, it was concerning.
When I went to get tested for a fish and shellfish allergy, the results were inconclusive. “Have you recently had other allergic reactions,” my doctor asked. I hadn’t, but I was coming out of a bout of stress-related chronic hives that wouldn’t go away. My doctor tested things that we know I’m not allergic to but that are high in histamine (like tomatoes). Those came back as false positives.
My doctor thought maybe the reason I reacted to shellfish and fish was because these foods are high-histamine foods and I already had a lot of histamine in my body. Over the past year, we ran a battery of other tests, I was diagnosed with an unrelated autoimmune disease, and I started treatment.
Still, just to be safe, my doctor told me not to consume any fish I hadn’t already IDed as safe and to come back in for testing a year out (my insurance wouldn’t cover testing sooner).
My doctor told me, “For the purposes of your eating, you are allergic to shellfish and any fish you haven’t already eaten and not reacted to.”
I started telling servers and chefs this story at the top of dinners. I watched their eyes glaze over when I tried to explain that I might be allergic to shellfish and fish but that I wasn’t 100% sure.
I was trying to be honest, because I know that people faking allergies that are preferences causes all sorts of problems for restaurants. Finally, a server said, “Okay, so you’re allergic to shellfish?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Just say you’re allergic,” she said.
“But it’s maybe not true,” I said.
“I’m going to ring it in the same way,” she said with a shrug.
I kept hearing this from servers over and over again. The spiel was too long. I literally workshopped it to try to make it shorter. When I tried to put that I was avoiding these foods in my tasting menu notes, I got call after call asking if it was a preference or allergy. “Maybe neither,” is an incredibly annoying response, but it’s the truth. The fact was I couldn’t have shellfish or fish. Still, every once in a while in a conversation with a chef, they’d get frustrated with me when I told them the whole story—and if my response was, “Maybe neither,” it wasn’t taken seriously in restaurants.
I felt like I was in this lose-lose situation. Either I was making my server ask me a ton of follow-up questions only to write the same notes in as they would for an allergy when they rang in my tickets or I made chefs grumpy because I wasn’t telling servers about my saga.
I talked to a lot of chefs and servers about this and finally came to the conclusion that to make sure I wasn’t accidentally consuming a potential allergen, I should just say I couldn’t have it. I normally said just that, “I can’t have shellfish and I can’t have a lot of fish but I can have some fish.”
But often in conversations, I didn’t want to get into it. I didn’t want to tell people about a health struggle I had last year and I didn’t want to tell people about my reactions in restaurants over and over. I didn’t want to talk about my autoimmune problems. I didn’t want to be reminded of a challenge to my health in every single restaurant.
A person who isn’t a food writer doesn’t need to be careful about this, but I felt I had justify myself to in some ways. A random person at the advice of their doctor would just say, “I’m allergic.” From time to time, when I didn’t want to get into it, that’s what I’d say, but most of the time, I tried to be clearer.
In my writing, I wrote things like this in my Le Burger review: I’ve eaten everything on the menu except the le poisson (I’m maybe allergic and not eating fish until I get a confirmation—long story!).
Or in my Bûcheron review: I’m maybe allergic to some fish and shellfish.
Or in my Herbst review: I’m maybe allergic to most but not all seafood.
I never felt like I said the right thing, but I was trying to be as transparent as I could be without telling every server a long story about chronic hives while they were waist-deep in the weeds.
Throughout this year, I worried. I do really hope one day to have a home at a press and I know that not being able to eat shellfish or a large amount of fish is eliminating. I think it’s fair that it’s eliminating.
It was also hard to be an anonymous reservation anywhere as even in a closed kitchen, “no shellfish, no to most seafood, caviar/roe okay” is far more identifying than my hair.
So when the test was going on, my allergist knew there were stakes. In a blood test and a prick test, every single fish and shellfish she tested came back not inconclusive this time, but clear: “You’re not allergic,” she said with a smile.
I left that appointment and immediately drove to Sea Salt, eating their clam fries for the first time. I’m happy to report that I didn’t have a reaction to those or the shrimp I had at Chimborazo or the scallops at Cafe Yoto.
2: So what does that mean for my writing?
I don’t think it’s fair for any writer to start writing about a type of food they just had for the first time and talk about it like they have any authority.
This to me is both true for specific dishes as it is true for ingredients. The reason why I feel this is that I’ve seen a lot of critics make mistakes. They have birria for the first time and they have an amazing experience eating it, so they say it’s excellent, but they actually went to a place that in the ranking of birria is right in the middle. Or they’ll eat a new ingredient and write it off because of the way the restaurant prepared it. Sometimes, I think food writers make a mistake of not telling people, “This is the first time I’ve had X,” so that readers can have a sense of how expert they are in relation to that food.
So for me, if we’re talking about an entire class of food that I now need to incorporate into my writing, you’re not going to see that tomorrow. I ate meat for 18 months before I ever wrote about meat in an essay.
Before then, I simply didn’t know enough. Can I tell you when I’ll write about shellfish for the first time? Definitely sooner than 18 months, because there’s more than one review I’m working on that would benefit from it. But you probably won’t see anything about shellfish in the summer.
Those first pieces will be heavily supported by people who eat shellfish all the time. I’ll eat with people who love shellfish when I’m reviewing. I’ll double check with them that my experience with similar to theirs. And, of course, I eat with a chef at least at every restaurant (boyfriend perk).
I have a bucket list to go to— restaurants whose menus were severely limited to me based on not being able to eat shellfish or because no restrictions guidelines meant I couldn’t go.
I have a whole new world to explore. A lot of traditional Hmong dishes. Oysters. Crab cakes. Lobster rolls. Maybe I’ll finally take a trip to New Orleans. Maybe a friend’s dad who swears he makes the best crab cakes around will put his cakes to the test. But first up, is sushi—I have a short list of restaurants with the best quality fish in the city and I’m working my way through one fish at a time to get to know it, understand it, and be able to identify the good from the okay from the bad.
I promise to take this on with the same intensity in which I learned duck and beef. I treat so much of my food writing as a science, where I try to get really, really clear about what best in show means and why something is the best.
One of the greatest joys in my life is that when I thought that there was no more new food for me to eat because I had had all of the vegetarian food I could have, introducing meat into my palate meant I had a whole new range of flavors and textures. I’m excited to go on that journey again.
Have a spot you think I should go to for oysters or scallops or any other shellfish? Tell me on Instagram, but (and I say this with love) only if you know what you’re talking about.
XOXO
