Discover gluten-free travel insights in New Zealand and Singapore. Explore dining options, tips, and experiences for a safe culinary adventure.
Exploring Gluten-Free Options and Dining Experiences in Two Diverse Destinations
Traveling gluten-free can be a unique experience, and a recent trip comparing New Zealand and Singapore highlights significant differences in gluten-free dining options. New Zealand, particularly the South Island, is celebrated as a gluten-free paradise. Many restaurants clearly mark their gluten-free options, making it easy for travelers to find safe meals. Highlights include Joe’s Garage in Christchurch, which offers delicious fried chicken and a gluten-free Cobb salad, and Erik’s Fish and Chips in Queenstown, where all menu items except for malt vinegar are gluten-free. Grocery stores also provide an impressive selection of gluten-free products, such as Gluten-Free Tim Tams and Hot Cross Buns, ensuring that gluten-free travelers can indulge in local treats.
In contrast, gluten-free dining in Singapore presents a different challenge. Awareness of gluten and celiac disease is lower, and many residents avoid gluten for general health rather than medical reasons. This means that dining out requires more research and caution. Hawker centers, which are integral to Singapore’s food culture, often pose difficulties due to cross-contamination risks. Travelers need to identify safe restaurants ahead of time, as options are more limited compared to New Zealand. Specialty stores like Little Farms and Ryan’s Grocery offer gluten-free products, but the variety is not as extensive, emphasizing the need for careful planning when navigating the gluten landscape in Singapore.
Exploring Culinary Paradises: A Gluten-Free Adventure from the Land of the Long White Cloud to the Lion City
Hey everyone, I’m Karen, I run Gluten Free Singapore, InternationalGlutenFree.Com, and I have a trip report for you today. Now, look, videos, videos are not my thing, and I have decided just to go, for purpose, for getting the information out there to you rather than perfection, which is tough. So I promise you, if you’re watching this, I have edited this whole video for ums and ahs and added as many pictures as I can. This is going to be pretty low tech and not real slick, but hopefully you’ll find it very useful.
I have lived in Singapore for over 14 years. I arrived here in 2011 with an eight year old celiac child and a celiac husband. So we’ve been doing gluten-free here a long time. This video is for a very niche audience. People who are gluten-free or celiac. And people who are either planning a trip to New Zealand or if you’re coming from New Zealand, Australia, planning a trip to Singapore. That’s the information I’m going to go over today. Here’s how we’re going to do it.
First, I will go through a basic trip report, and then I’m going to compare it to Singapore and what you would expect here if you’re coming to visit us And then I am going to show you all the great stuff I brought back from New Zealand to Singapore. Okay, listen, we have a great gluten-free Singapore travel guide I am working really hard this month to actually make it completely free. We run on donations. I have this guide on a independent platform, which is paid for out of pocket and anything that we collect in donations Really just goes to offset.
The cost of keeping it up there for you Although you will see us on main social media platforms I’m trying not to be dependent on them So you never know things happen, just recently a major one went offline for a while and everybody panicked especially in the USA we do not have advertisements and not at the whims of the major social media oligarchs, just me. I own and produce all the content. So if you can make a donation and help us keep it up and running. In addition to keeping this information available to anyone who needs it also helps bring awareness and education to Singapore as well.
All right. So we just spent a week in New Zealand on the South Island and it was fabulous. My husband, no wheat Pete, and I went together over the Chinese New Year holiday. We had a great time. We have been there once before with the kids about 11 years ago. That time we did a camper van and did three weeks on both islands and it was great. At the time our little Celiac was 11 years old, 12, and she.
Was just in absolute heaven. It was so easy. We flew Qantas from Changi Airport in Singapore through Brisbane to Christchurch and spent the night there. I didn’t do a huge amount of research before going, I’ve been to Australia and we’ve been to New Zealand once before, and I knew that it was fairly straightforward for gluten-free. When we got there I did a quick research and found a couple of great blogs, I will, I’ll put all the links to anything I reference below and I found a great.
Little restaurant walking distance from our hotel in downtown called Joe’s Garage. Pete got fried chicken. He could not have been happier and I got a grilled chicken Cobb salad which I also ordered gluten-free so that we could share now quite honestly like gluten-free was just really easy. We asked “do you have gluten-free options?” “Yep. No problem”. Almost every menu that we saw was marked with clearly either no gluten ingredients or has a gluten-free option.
And it was great. He was so happy to have fried chicken and fries. He had sweet potato fries with a dedicated fryer. All right, the next day we drove from Christchurch all the way down to Queenstown, which we did on purpose. I know we could have flown into Queenstown, but we really wanted to do the ride and I have so many pictures of beautiful lakes and mountains and it was totally worth it. We stopped in Geraldine for lunch, I didn’t really have a plan.
I sort of looked up restaurants, found one as we were driving by. It exceeded all expectations. We stopped at Mundell’s Cafe. I wasn’t quite sure what they had, but figured they could probably do something. And sure enough, when we asked, “do you have any gluten-free options?” They said, “oh, in the display case, everything on the top rack is gluten-free.” That was exactly what I wanted to hear. So big win. Thank you so much.
Pete and I split a crepe cranberry cup and corn fritters with bacon lovely lunch and then we realized that right next door was a gin distillery. That’s one of our favorites. So we popped over there and picked up some gin to take to our friend’s house. We got two great little bottles plus a gorgeous bottle of slow gin. Humdingers, humdingers gin. I’ll list all of the links. In the notes below this video. We got down to Queenstown met our friends and went to the gantry tavern.
And again, the menu well marked, Pete got a pork belly salad. I got the pork belly sandwich. It was fabulous. They had a huge selection of beers, but also a whole bunch of gluten-free ciders, some of them homemade, great experience. We also got crispy cauliflower with lemon and garlic, fabulous. So that’s how our holiday started. And it only got better from there. In Queenstown, we went to Erik’s Fish and Chips.
If you’re going to Queenstown, New Zealand and you’re a celiac, hands down. This was great. It is a little hole in the wall place. And I walked up to the window and said, Do I need to do anything to order a gluten-free? And the woman at the counter simply told me, you can have everything except for the malt vinegar on the counter. We, got fish and chips and, calamari there. Then later on, I actually learned that they had doughnuts too.
So we went back a second time for doughnuts. It was absolutely fabulous. and delicious. It was so nice to order something fried and not have to worry about cross contamination. We went to a couple wineries, highly recommended. Queenstown’s great for vineyards. We ate one day at Mount Difficulty, which was gorgeous way up in one of the hills and, menu was well marked.
We also ate at a restaurant named Soda downtown in Queenstown, Main Town area. We walked in and asked “what, gluten-free options do you have? What are the best things to order?” the waitress’s reply was, “actually it would be easier for me to tell you what you cannot order rather than what you can”. She listed off about three things on the menu that he couldn’t have. and everything else is fine. That was amazing. Highly recommend trying the lamb. As usual, we try to get everything gluten-free so we can just share.
We ended up with lamb paella and so many other delicious things. We also ate at Rata, which was another fabulous menu. Same thing, the waitress checked off the three things he couldn’t have and away we went. So that was great. At end of our trip we drove back from Queenstown all the way back to Christchurch for our flight out and we spent the night before our flight at the Novotel at the Christchurch Airport and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but that was the probably the best restaurant in an airport I’ve ever been to.
There’s a fabulous little restaurant on the top floor of the airport NovoTel that overlooks the runways. Again, no problem getting a gluten-free meal. Everybody knows what they’re doing. Pete had salmon and a green pea risotto and I got a roast chicken piccata. Then we ended up splitting a dessert, Something delicious and it wasn’t a fruit platter. So winning. We flew out super early in the morning.
It was a 6 am flight and if you ever have an early morning flight out of Christchurch I definitely recommend this hotel because it’s a one minute walk from the front door of the hotel into the check in terminal, While we were there, we also stopped by several grocery stores Woolworth’s or Woolies I love going to grocery stores, especially to see what great gluten-free options they have. And I was not disappointed. We found gluten-free Tim Tams in every single one. Also , the gluten-free minty slices.
Oh, yeah. Plus, all sorts of other great stuff. At the end of this video, I’ll show you all the great stuff I packed and brought back from New Zealand in our luggage for all of my gluten-free friends. And we flew Qantas. The last leg of the trip was a so we actually flew Finnair, via Qantas. According to Pete, that was the best gluten-free airline meal he’d ever have. I have pictures of all of them. I will also, I’ll also do a quick airline trip report in case you want.
To know what you might be eating. gluten-free options on airlines. It’s always kind of hit or miss, isn’t it? Okay. So, if you’re coming from Singapore or anywhere else and going to New Zealand, you really need to do very little research ahead of time. It’s, good to familiarize yourself with, where you’re going and what are some good options along the way. But by and large, every restaurant we went to understood gluten-free,.
There was very little, discussion on like, that we can’t do this. And it was a lovely, relaxing trip. And honestly, when in doubt, you can stop at any grocery store and find plenty of options. So, go to New Zealand if, um, if I could find a reason to move there, it’s , probably my top choice. That brings me to anybody from New Zealand or Australia coming to Singapore because this is totally different. New Zealand, and actually I’ve been to Australia, you guys are great.
Singapore. Has a, how do I say it? Just a crippling, lack of understanding and awareness of both what gluten is and cross contamination. And I’m not going to fault them. Celiac disease is not, common nor diagnosed in the local population here. Most people are gluten-free for other health reasons or by choice, but not particularly for celiac disease. Thus the awareness has not yet grown and honestly we’re working on it,.
But we’ve got a long way to go. If you’re coming to Singapore, you need to do your research first. It is not the same as traveling in New Zealand, where everybody knows what’s going on. There are much more limited places to eat. I know Singapore is a foodie culture, but hawker centers are extremely difficult. I’m not saying that there’s nothing here, but you need to know what you’re doing because you’ll be exhausted with the amount of no’s and cannot do that, that you will hear.
I do have an entire guide, which will list the most common restaurants that we have found that we deem safe, as well as places to buy groceries and little things you need to know about gluten-free in Singapore, which are not going to be the same as, your home country. Okay, so I packed, as much as I could into my suitcase to bring back to Singapore with me. Let me show you what great goodies we found in New Zealand grocery stores. Hold on. Here we go.
For starters, this was definitely one of our favorite crackers. Just nice little rice thins go with everything. When we were there with our daughter years ago, they went through bags and bags of those. Bread in every grocery store. This was one that we liked and I bought at the beginning of our trip. We ended up not even opening it because we had so much other great stuff to eat. that I just packed it and brought it back with me. It’s now going into the freezer for my dear husband.
All right, my friends. You probably know there’s gluten-free Tim Tams, but oh my goodness, these things are to die for. And I’ll be honest, Pete only had like three of these. I’m pretty sure I ate the rest of the pack. So I brought back Several. Found these at the grocery store. I think they’re crackers. This is the only gluten-free one I found, but they look like fun.
Anyway, I’m sure if you’re, Australian or a Kiwi, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Oh, let’s see. Rocky road slice. Does this just say, like, rough day? I’m gonna store this. I don’t even know if Pete’s gonna eat this. This might be all for me. Alright.
More mint cookies. Yeah. Because, you know, you just can’t go wrong with chocolate and mint. Two more of these. And Alright. Scotch fingers. And finally, hot cross buns. This was the chocolate version, and this was the apple cinnamon, and of course they had the regular fruit ones, but you know, I’ve had those before.
I will say, actually, I ate the majority of a pack of these for breakfast, in the week that we were traveling. So, that was the great stuff I brought back with me. Lots of it is going to the freezer for no wheat Pete, and some I’ll be sharing with my gluten-free friends here. So if you’re going to New Zealand, or Australia, for heaven’s sakes bring an extra bag to bring as much stuff back in your luggage as possible. Thanks for watching. Uh, that is my New Zealand trip report.
If you’re coming to visit Singapore and if you need any help, I am available to book calls with. If you’ve been to New Zealand or Australia, I also would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions. All right. Thank you so much. You can find more information at www. internationalglutenfree. com and until next time.
Bye.
