The Italian places near me that aren't chains will have an antipasto, and a chef in the back, and so aren't that challenging.

I love me a bunless cheese burger with bacon, and I'll take a side salad, which is usually available.

What is going to trip me up moving forward with my new eating plan is the dressing. (Trying to be ruthless about seed oils moving forward.) Even the "oil" in requesting oil and vinegar won't be olive oil, you can bet the farm on that! But just vinegar works for me.

Or you could do like my mom does with tea bags and bring your own! https://www.amazon.com/Minerva-Virg...+size+olive+oil

When I asked for O&V they brought me some old nasty cooking oil and white industrial strength vinegar. I took one sniff of the old nasty oil and almost got sick!

I had a similar experience - the taste was pretty bad! For a while I took my own dressing with me, then decided that I eat out so rarely (once every couple of months or so), the restaurant dressing wouldn't kill me.

However, if I'm traveling any distance & would have to eat restaurant food several meals in a row, I take my own food. I usually prefer my own cooking anyway.

There was a Chinese restaurant where I didn't want any sugary sauce so I asked if they could just stir-fry the dish in sesame oil and they said they didn't have any! Chinese food and no sesame oil but they did have one gallon tubs of red surgery corn syrup poured all over the food...OMG

I had a doctor tell me once I was really lucky to get signals from my food (sensitivities). She said a lot of people don't get that feedback to they just keep eating junk. I think it's probably more that they are not attuned to it, though. It's true that it's a skill some people have no idea how to work on.

This intrigues me Thanks!

One local Chinese restaurant managed to gluten me with steamed shrimp and broccoli.

In emergencies sushi won't try to kill me, as long as I skip the soy sauce, but the carb load from the rice is a problem.

I agree with your take: sometimes I stop for morning coffee at a number of different gas station/convenience stores along my route. No matter what, there's someone buying breakfast: coffee and pastry, and their lunch: frozen dinner or wrapped sandwich and always a package of snack cakes.

When I ate like that I would just be constantly miserable and how would I know otherwise?

$8.99 for 5 mini bottles, 3 oil & 2 vinegar, with less than 1 1/2 Tbls in each bottle!! I think I'll pass But the idea isn't bad; just make up your own at home.

Agreed. Will be experimenting with that when salads come back on board, usually don't crave those until spring really gets sprung.

However, I can always ask for dill pickles as a side. I get funny looks, but I give them a number of item (spears I ask for four, etc) and I almost always get taken care of that way.

Gotta have your green vegetables. Though cucumbers are actually very low sugar fruit.

Works for me, because I never pass up pickles. Since birth, practically.

Yes, they have two sauces that any untrained person in the kitchens can do, a white corn starch sauce and a red bottled corn syrup sauce...that's it. Then consider the crappy oil that's used and it's nothing but a hot mess.....talk about ruining good food!!

Then add in a recent bit of info that corn can cross over and trigger the gluten-sensitive: it's a mine field out there!

Absolutely agree, and isn't it funny that both of those, red and white are corn based?
Then.............top it off with massive amounts of MSG which any kitchen person can shake on in massive amounts not knowing what it really is due to no training.
I had fajitas once with so much MSG on the meat that it turn into pure mush in your mouth. My mother use to say to never use meat tenderizer because if it tenderized meat, that's what it is doing to our digestive system.
By the way, I was convinced a few years ago that MSG was one of the causes of a HS flare-up. It happened every time I had some.

My MSG symptom is an excruciating headache. Enough to make me extremely wary on top of the other problems with run-of-the-mill Chinese.