12 glammed-up gluten-free menu ideas

Providing safe, gluten-free options for your guests doesn’t mean you have to put your rockstar chef persona on hold. There are plenty of glammed-up, glitzy and just plain great ways to give gluten-free menu items a real glow-up.

For Sodexo Chef Michael J. Natoli at the University of Southern Indiana, gluten-free menus are inherently future-thinking. “It’s a crucial component to our menu engineering because of this generational trend towards dietary accommodation,” he says. “Our board dining room features many daily gluten-free and plant-based (and non-plant-based) menu options for our mostly Gen Z customers.”

That said, Natoli and his team “still want the ‘wow factor’ from creativity, presentation and taste. This is especially important when we provide large catered meals for campus special events, attempting to create plates that cross as many allergy restrictions as possible and still get gasps of ‘Wow!’ from our customers when placed in front of them at their table,” he says. That’s at the core of the cool collection of gluten-free ideas we’ve assembled here.