When choosing dinner becomes a group puzzle
My husband is from India, and marrying into his world introduced me to something I had never fully appreciated: no two people’s dietary restrictions seem to follow quite the same rulebook.
One friend may be vegetarian but eat eggs. Another avoids eggs yet happily eats dairy. Someone else eats chicken but no other meat, while a pescatarian may be fine with fish but need to avoid shellfish—or even squid and octopus. Planning dinner with a group can quickly turn into a cheerful pre-meal summit: “Wait, remind me—who can eat what?” Choosing a restaurant starts to feel like solving a particularly delicious puzzle.
The hidden ingredients that make dining out in Japan tricky
Japan has become much easier to navigate for international visitors, and multilingual restaurant menus are increasingly common. That is wonderful progress. But for anyone dining out in Japan with dietary restrictions, a translated menu name often answers only the first question.
A vegetable dish may use fish-based dashi. Bread or sweets may contain animal-derived ingredients such as lard or gelatin. Sauces, extracts, and soup stocks can be difficult to spot from the dish name alone. Watching friends search through separate restaurant websites and allergen PDFs made me wonder: what if you could choose the foods you want to avoid first, then compare menu information across restaurants in one place?
Food allergies are part of the bigger picture
Dietary needs are not only about culture, religion, or lifestyle. More families around me are also navigating food allergies to eggs, milk, peanuts, and other ingredients. Food allergies are not preferences, and a reaction can be serious.
That is why Food Safety Search does not label a dish as universally “safe” or promise that someone can eat it. Instead, it makes published restaurant allergen information easier to explore. It is a starting point for research—not a replacement for checking the latest official information and speaking with the restaurant before ordering.
A simpler way to search restaurant menus
That idea became Food Safety Search: a restaurant menu search designed around the foods each person wants to avoid. It brings together allergen information published by restaurant companies so users can review relevant menu information without beginning from scratch on every website.
Although official allergen data is at its core, the goal is broader. I hope the site will be useful to vegetarians, pescatarians, people with religious or cultural food requirements, and anyone else whose choices do not fit neatly into a single label. If it saves a little time, removes a little uncertainty, and makes it easier for more people to enjoy the same table, it will have done exactly what I built it to do.