Gluten & dairy free restaurants in Switzerland

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    31 January 2018 at 21:26:32 #814209

    This forum has already been extremely helpful in planning my trip so hopefully someone has a few suggestions for me.

    Looking for recommendations for reasonable priced gluten & dairy free restaurants in Zurich, Lucerne and Basel. The person I am travelling with does not have any dietary restrictions so as long as there are a few gluten free and dairy free options for me that would be great. We are staying at the Leoneck in Zurich, Ameron Flora in Lucerne and just in Basel for lunch. Hoping there are some restaurants that are easily accessible from our hotels. Thanks for any assistance.

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    1 February 2018 at 1:54:12 #875451

    Hi Linda,

    >> Looking for recommendations for reasonable priced gluten & dairy free restaurants in Zurich, Lucerne and Basel … We are staying at the Leoneck in Zurich, Ameron Flora in Lucerne and just in Basel for lunch.

    The Hotel Leoneck has its own restaurant, now called Bar – 8001 (a big improvement on the previous name, the Crazy Cow)!

    You can read their menu at the link below. Gluten-free and lactose-free dishes are denoted with a graphic, the key to which is at the bottom of the menu (glutenfrei and laktosefrei).

    http://www.restaurant-8001.ch/assets/Uploads /Speisekarte-Oktober-18.pdf

    The Hotel Leoneck is also not far from Niederdorfstrasse, a pedestrianised street in the old town with lots of restaurants and bars. It’s a short walk (downhill on the way there, uphill on the way back), or you can get tram #6 or #10 from outside the hotel (tramstop Haldenegg) one stop to tramstop Central, which is adjacent to the start of the Niederdorfstrasse.

    In menus generally, look for the words glutenfrei and laktosefrei. Two other useful words might be mit (with) and ohne (without).

    By the way, if you are arriving at Zürich Airport, you can get Tram #10 from the airport (direction: Zürich, Bahnhofplatz/HB), which will drop you right outside Hotel Leoneck – tramstop Haldenegg, as mentioned above. It is a low-floor tram, with level entry from the platform, so very easy with luggage.

    For going out to the airport to catch a flight, I would, however, prefer the train.

    Alpenrose

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    1 February 2018 at 6:44:56 #875452

    lindayork–

    My wife and I also eat gluten-free and we visited Zurich and other parts of Switzerland this past summer and this is what we experienced. Bear in mind that we are not celiac (although our daughter is), so we were not as sensitive to the risk of cross-contamination as someone with celiac would be. If you do have celiac, I’m sure you’ve developed an array of questions that precede almost any restaurant experience.

    Having said that, in Switzerland you need to distinguish between breakfast vs lunch or dinner. Breakfasts are heavily bread influenced, but every place that we stayed in (including a couple of smaller pensions out in the country) were able to procure fresh-baked GF bread, provided the request was made by 5 PM (more or less) the day before. (The order is actually placed by them with the pharmacy, at least in some cases. Had no idea that pharmacists could also bake.) In many cases, the GF breads were the best we had ever encountered (and as SF Bay Area residents, we like to think we’ve experienced some pretty good ones in our local bakeries). We had visions of cracking the secret Swiss recipe for GF peasant bread and bringing it back to the States. Maybe in another life. The muesli tends to be unreliable, but some places do make a point to include GF muesli in their breakfast spreads and label it as such.

    As to dinner, in Zurich, we did not search out GF-only restaurants (and doubt there are any), but instead merely avoided the fondue joints and the large touristy locales that can be problematic. We had a superb seafood dinner at Conti’s (courtesy of a recommendation by Slowpoke on this board), but we also ate in several other places, just avoiding bread and noodle dishes, as well as anything with a heavy-looking sauce likely to have been fortified with yeast. Haus Hiltl (a vegetarian restaurant) was recommended as a good place for us, but we didn’t have a chance to try it.

    Outside of Zurich, we tended to eat dinners in our hotel restaurant, as they knew we were GF and always took pains to see that we had GF bread for dinner and even modified their main dish recipes on our account (thank you, Hotel Bellevue in Muerren!). Just dropping into a restaurant for dinner tended not to have such a successful result, and we’d often end up with just a salad.

    As for lunches, since we’re hikers, we either packed lunches from the hotel in the morning, or bought some GF bread and made sandwiches from the Coop. The packaged GF bread was actually also quite good (Scharfer, or something to that effect).

    Last but not least, there is also a very good Swiss GF beer, although I’m no longer recalling the name. Ask about it and they’ll know.

    Hope this is helpful. Overall, we found it easier to travel GF in Switz than in the US. They’re maybe not quite at the level of attainment of New Zealand in this regard (where apparently over 2% of the population has celiac), but very good overall.

    NTL

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    1 February 2018 at 6:48:18 #875453

    Hi Linda,

    Here is a handy guide to gluten-free restaurants in Zurich (with a handy map) https://glutenfreeinzu rich.ch/en/index.html

    and two other restaurants advertising lactose-free (and gluten free) options again in Zurich:

    Here’s a short list for Lucerne: https://www.glutenfree roads.com/en/gfr-gluten-free-travel-in/luzern/eating-glutenfreegluten-free-restaurants/

    &
    Basel: https://www.glutenfree roads.com/en/advanced-search/?search=loc&searchlocat ion=basel&katessen=1&k atreisen=1&katkaufen=1

    I have a gluten-free Canadian friend who lives here part of the year and says that he can handle the regular bread here from time to time without issue – we think it’s down to the fact that they know how to make proper bread here. 🙂 He has no issue finding Gluten-free in Zurich but its the biggest city with the most options.

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