In the words of the wonderful and slightly overrated Adele, hello from the other side (of my computer).

It has been a while…. life has gotten in the way of blogging recently (stupid real life!!). Thankfully, Sean Markey from Krank.ie noticed this and offered to do a guest post on a subject close to his heart (and let’s face it, all of our hearts) TAKEAWAYS.

I’ve blogged about getting your takeaway fix in Dublin before but it’s always good to get another persons perspective and pick up some tips so, without further adieu, I will hand you over to Sean.

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Picture the scene; you’ve invited a bunch of friends over to your place for a long overdue get-together. The catch up banter is great and there’s plenty of liquor to go around, but now it’s feeding time and the assorted table snacks that you’ve laid out just aren’t going to cut it! There’s only one thing that is going to fill this food shaped hole in everyone’s bellies and that is a big ol’ takeaway feed!

As any coeliac will tell you, finding good gluten free takeaways in your area that’ll please everyone can be a bit tricky, but this blog post should help make things a little bit easier for you. Of course, most takeaways have some gluten free options and there’s lots of nice stuff that’s gluten free by its very nature, but you still need to be very careful when ordering from takeaways that don’t operate with a gluten free philosophy first and foremost. A lot of foods like chips and rice noodles are meant to be free of gluten, but you can’t take for granted that what you’re ordering is totally safe. There is always the risk of cross contamination.

For more gluten free fast food ideas (both in terms of takeaway delivery restaurants and nice frozen meals which you can cook easily at home), check out this post published here from a couple of years back or have a look through this handy guide which is a fairly comprehensive list of Irish gluten free takeaways ordered by location – it’s certainly saved my bacon on one or two occasions when I was far from home.

I think a lot of places are waking up to the fact that the coeliac amongst us like tasty / greasy foodjust as much as the next person. Not only that, but if you make things easy for us we will become repeat customers and get our friends in on the act too – meaning more money for them!

Here are my mini-reviews of my two favourite gluten-friendly restaurants which service (nearly) all of Dublin:

Firehouse Pizza

A class above most pizza delivery services, Firehouse Pizza is a restaurant which takes great pride inthe fact that their pizza bases are gluten free by default, so that’s one thing you need not worryabout right off the bat. While some pizzerias have a gluten free base option, more often than not,they don’t taste as good as the regular ones. This is not the case with firehouse, who’s GF pizza base is great!

Boasting meal deals and a selection of sides that will rival the biggest pizza delivery chains, the vastmajority of things on Firehouse Pizza’s menu are safe for coeliacs to eat – they even have a handyallergy table so you can see exactly what is and isn’t suitable.

There are currently two Firehouse Pizza restaurants in Dublin, Ballymun and Booterstown, so youshould be able to get yourself a delivery if you’re living on either side of the city.

KOH Thai Restaurant

Located on the Millennium Walkway just off Jervis Street, KOH is a stylish restaurant / bar whichspecialises in Asian cuisine, especially thai food. While I would definitely recommend a sit-in diningexperience if you can make it in to the restaurant itself (it makes a great starting point for a night out hanks to a fab cocktail menu), they do an excellent delivery service too.

While the KOH delivery menu is not quite as all-inclusive as the sit-in one, it still offers a great range of high quality food at affordable prices (granted, it is a little bit more expensive than most Asian takeaways, but this is some serious restaurant quality stuff we’re talking about here). Best of all,their menu is very clearly marked with smiley faces which indicate which dishes are gluten free (i.e. most of them) so you never have to worry about ordering the wrong thing or cross contaminated food.

As it’s based in Dublin’s city centre, Koh delivers up to 6km outside of the city.