So last night the PuTTY team went out for an expensive meal at ‘Chez Gerard’, during which I accidentally departed from my strict gluten-free diet. The waiter sounded entirely clued-up on the subject and confidently pointed out the (large) subset of the menu which was safe for me to eat; but just as I'd finished my starter he dashed up looking very apologetic and said it had had breadcrumbs on top.

In fact I had noticed this myself when the starter arrived, and had almost called someone over to double-check before starting to eat, but didn't quite do so because the waiter had seemed so knowledgeable that I decided to trust him, and therefore assumed that the apparent breadcrumbs were something breadcrumb-like but gluten-free. As Ben pointed out, though, it's perfectly possible to be both knowledgeable and wrong :-/ Next time I'll be less trusting.

It's very annoying that I don't quite know whether to feel cross with the waiter or with myself. If the breadcrumbs had been non-obvious then it would clearly have been nobody's fault but the waiter's; but they were obviously there and I nearly double-checked but didn't, which makes me feel as if I knew perfectly well I was making a mistake but made it anyway.

Oh well. I'm sure I'll survive; I didn't have any perceptible symptoms even before going on the diet, so it wasn't as if I was in any immediate danger of exploding violently. I do slightly worry, though, that experiences like this might make me more reluctant to risk eating out at all, which would be a bad thing.