Where to Find the Best Gluten-free Food in Hobart
The coeliac dining experience can be fraught with danger – but these six Hobart cafés and restaurants take the guesswork out of going gluten-free.
Straight Up Coffee and Food
Coeliacs rejoice. The world is your gluten-free oyster at this central Hobart vegetarian café and roastery where a “clean eating” mission turns the entire menu into a safe word. With breakfasts of orange and vanilla waffles, smashed banana and tea-poached pear on the house-baked GF toast and even poached eggs on brioche, you won’t be missing a thing.
The Black-Footed Pig
Follow the Iberian buzz to this tapas bolthole in the smartly renovated heritage-listed City Flour Mills, where gluten-free options are highlighted on the lengthy menu. Any gluten-avoiding diners can happily go to whoa on the menu, through tapas of seared Tassie scallops with cauliflower and anchovy cream, to raciones (mains) like pan-fried octopus with kipfler potatoes and charred witlof and desserts of lemon curd with toasted meringue and white chocolate sorbet.
Urban Greek
If there’s anyone who knows how to party without gluten, it’s the Greeks. Hit this slickly designed restaurant in the Hobart CBD for an edible ode to Hellenic life, including the all-important dips (gluten-free options include hummus, tzatziki and fava bean), a traditional Cretan village salad made with barley rusks and a wealth of smoke-licked meat off the chargrill.
Solo Pasta & Pizza
Being denied pizza is truly a tragedy so Italian hotspot Solo Pizza and Pasta has taken pity on the gluten-free and devised their own recipe for wheat-free bases. Toppings, you ask? They stop all stations from a classic Margherita to a seafood-heavy pescatore, laden with mussels, prawns and anchovies. And that’s not all: you can sink your teeth into the likes of a Wagyu carpaccio jazzed up with the flavour-bombs of fried capers, risotto mined with hot salami or veal scallopine done just as nonna made it with marsala cream sauce.
Suzie Luck’s
It’s not only the Hobart headquarters of pan-Asian good times, it’s a haven for allergy sufferers of all stripes. Suzie Luck’s caters for the gluten free as well as anyone averse to shellfish, dairy, chilli or peanuts, offering a separate menu for each so there’s no confusion. Hallelujah. The GF menu parties down with 20 options. Start with the tingle of Szechuan pepper-spiced salt and vinegar pork crackling, crack on to betel leaf curled around ocean trout with grapefruit, avocado and watermelon nahm jim, and finish triumphantly with their snow egg with spiced rhubarb and toasted coconut.
Aloft
Perched at the end of the Brooke Street Pier overlooking the Derwent River, Aloft is the special occasion go-to for Hobart coeliacs thanks to the understanding nature of acclaimed chef Christian Ryan. A la carte options change with the seasons but might include tempura eggplant in Tasmanian mountain pepper-spiced caramel, agadashi tofu in burnt onion broth and chamomile pavlova with charry pineapple and whipped coconut cream. Spoiled for choice? Leave decisions in the kitchen’s hands and go the full gluten-free banquet menu.
