Most of the menu is a sales document. One part of it is not. When somebody with a nut allergy reads your description, they are making a decision about their evening and occasionally about the hospital, and they can tell within a line whether you have thought about it.

The line between a tag and a promise

A tag says what a dish is made of. It cannot say what a shared fryer did, or what the prep bench looked like at six. Say the first, be honest about the second, and never let a tag imply a kitchen you do not have.

The sentence that does this work is short and lives on the menu, not in somebody’s memory: what is prepared in a kitchen that also handles nuts, gluten, shellfish. Once. Where it can be read.

Tag the ones people ask about

• The common allergens, on the dishes that carry them.
• Vegetarian and vegan, kept apart — the butter in the mash matters.
• Gluten, said as it is: without gluten ingredients, or made in a separate area, whichever is true.
• Spice level, if your food has one. It is the third most asked question in every dining room.

Write it where the dish is

An allergen chart at the back of the menu, or on a laminated sheet behind the bar, is a chart nobody reads while choosing. The note has to be on the dish, at the moment somebody is deciding on it, or it is decoration.

Keeping it true

This is the part that fails. The recipe changes in March, the supplier changes in June, and the tag from last year is still sitting there. A tag that is wrong is worse than no tag, because it was believed.

The habit that keeps it honest is tying tags to the moment the dish changes. When somebody edits a price or swaps an ingredient, the tags are on the same screen and get looked at. Being able to change a tag on every dish at once, from a phone, in the ten minutes before service, is what makes that habit survive a busy month.

What the floor still has to do

None of this replaces a server asking. It changes what the question is. Instead of running to the kitchen to find out what is in the dressing, they are confirming something the guest already read — which takes twenty seconds and sounds like a place that knows its food.

A guest with an allergy is not reading your menu. They are reading whether you took it seriously.