Kell's Irish Pub Review

Jason here. Ever since returning from Ireland we have been on the lookout for a local pub, with live Irish music. While planning our next outing we discovered a restaurant in Seattle near Pike’s Place named Kells which has live music nearly every night and had people mentioning gluten free menu options, so they had us covered on both fronts. In our brief research it looks like Kells also has restaurants in Portland and San Francisco, so if you live in one of those areas let us know how they compare.

We decided to head on a Sunday when Liam Gallagher was playing, doing guitar and vocals. The live usually starts at 9:00 PM, so we decided to make a day of it and hit up Pike’s Place for bit around closing time, as well as head over to a local coffee shop to pass the time. Make sure you get to Kells early though, so you can get a nice seat near the stage. For myself, I enjoy being off near a wall where we can have a small table and seats to ourselves without being in the middle of everything going on. Makes it easier to just sit back with a drink and enjoy the music. 

I ordered a bowl of steamed mussels to snack on thinking they would make for a light meal I could make last. It’s a very generous bowl of mussels, served in a butter broth. I let our waiter know I had a gluten allergy and she was very informative, and made sure to leave out the side of Irish soda bread. I don’t know what it is about steamed mussels, but I’ve had terrible luck ordering them in other restaurants and having a piece of crumbling toast put on top. This time I was finally able to enjoy my bowl of mussels. 

The mussels themselves tasted pretty standard, with not a single bad one in the bunch. The mussels were cooked just right. (Over cooked mussels tend to be chewy and lose their flavor)

As I finished up my mussels I ordered a side of baked chips, which are just fries. I sort of made the false assumption they were homemade potato chips, but that’s my fault. For fries they cooked right, with the outside crunchy and inside fluffy. Again, they made a great food to partake in slowly while enjoying the music. I tend to fresh fries either plain or with a little bit of salt, and then as they become room temperature or cold switch over to dipping in ketchup. 

Finally, I ended the night with a dessert chocolate mousse. The music was winding down, and the last song played just as I was finishing up. Talk about great timing. If you like chocolate, you’ll enjoy the mousse. Without being able to compare side-by-side directly, I want to say Kells Mousse came in a slightly larger glass then I’m used to. Of course that could have just been how I felt after all the fries and mussels. 

Kayleigh here. Overall, the feel of the pub itself was very similar to what we had experienced in Ireland- although the patrons were a little more into having bachelorette parties and a little less into the live music. We stuck around for a couple of hours and never felt pressured to finish up eating to let more guests in. On top of that, our waitress was well informed on which dishes were already gluten free, and was very good about going to the kitchen and getting answers for all our questions. She even brought out the cheese platter with the bread on another plate and the cheese with porter not touching the other cheeses, so Jason could try some. Amazing service, considering how busy the restaurant was that night!

Cheap Ways to Shop Gluten Free

Kayleigh here. I won’t lie- going gluten free and trying to stay to a budget are very rarely concepts that work well together. Especially when you have just received the news about your new dietary restriction, all you want to do is buy bread that is the closest in taste to the bread that you have always eaten. You want fast food burgers, pastries, and packaged cakes and cookies- all the things that will cost you 2-3 times more than their glutinous counterparts, but rarely scratch that itch. So you end up buying another brand, and another, as your wallet continues crying.

Now, Jason and I do splurge on the occasional GF bakery lunch, or a package of English muffins or graham crackers. But we have learned to use them as special treats and indulgences. Overall, we have found that the best way to keep the grocery bill down is to make most of our meals with recipes that never involved wheat in the first place. And if they do, then we get creative and pull ideas from similar dishes to modify the approach. Below are a few examples of how to be a savvy gluten free shopper:

      1)      Use bread alternatives for sandwiches. Gluten free loaves are often quite expensive for the amount of slices you get. Instead, you can buy soft corn tortillas in the Hispanic foods aisle- most of the major brands will say if they are gluten free on the label. Keep a pack in the refrigerator, then warm them to use as wraps or toast them to use as sandwich bread. You can also microwave a potato until soft and serve up the ingredients as a baked potato. Or serve the sandwich fillings over a bowl of steamy rice!

      2)      Shop ethnic markets for unique alternatives. We are lucky enough to live in an area with a massive Asian supermarket (Uwajimaya), so we often use them as a second stop on our weekly grocery trip. There, we can get many different varieties of noodles made of different starches that cost no more than standard wheat pastas. It is also a great source for inexpensive tapioca and potato starch bags, bulk white and brown rice, and Tamari sauce (used instead of the pricey gluten free soy sauce in supermarkets). Check Mediterranean or European markets for buckwheat groats and chickpea flour, and see if your local Hispanic market has buns made out of tapioca starch and cheese.  While venturing into different cuisines with packaging in different languages can sound scary, we have had amazing success finding cheap goods in these sort of smaller stores!

      3)      Order expensive non-perishables in bulk online. To keep things cheap, but healthy and varied, we try to buy things like quinoa, gluten free oats, and more unusual flours online. Since bulk bins at stores have too much of a cross-contamination risk, this is a great way of saving a bit more money on the must-have items that can last a while in the pantry.

Or, if all else fails,

      4)     Learn to love baking! Spend some time experimenting with gluten free flours, and find some good recipes that can be made with cheap ingredients and very little fuss. If you plan on baking often, we find it worth the one-time pricetag to buy a breadmaker. We can bake a loaf or two of bread when we have time on the weekend, then slice it and throw it in the freezer. Then, during the week we can pull out a couple slices and nuke them up to room temperature without them getting stale or moldy. If you really want to make an investment, buy a flour mill or a blender/processor than can grind whole grains into flour. It is usually much cheaper to buy rice, millet, buckwheat, etc. and grind the flour yourself than it is to buy them pre-ground. Eventually, the mill more than pays for itself!

Jason here. Learning to shop gluten free was much like learning to shop cheaply in the first place. For me it’s all about finding those staple foods you can cook regularly with a few core ingredients that can be bought in bulk. Staple starch foods like Rice, Corn Tortilla’s, Potatoes, and other starches. Once you have those in mind, you can start planning meals around them. There are plenty of recipes online and databases you can search given particular ingredients. Find meals that appeal to you in both taste, and the amount of effort it will take to create them. As you find more meals, write them down in a handy list somewhere. As the list grows you can begin to rotate staple meals each week without feeling like you need to eat the same thing over and over again, just to save on budget. Even now we tend to have two dinners in rotation every week. So Monday, Wedneday, Friday we might have our Okonomiyaki, and Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday have Moffle Pizzas. That leaves us one day out of the week where we do something special like go out to eat or make some that takes a lot of extra preparation.