Auckland: One of the world's top gluten-free destinations

Chef Ben Bayly with his gourmet gluten-free vegetable pasta. Photo / Michael Craig

Auckland is the one of the best places in the world to grab a gluten-free bite, an international survey has found. Forget soggy-cardboard bread and bone-dry baking, our restaurants and cafes are stepping up to the plate when it comes to catering to dietary requirements.

Travel deal company Travel Supermarket crunched the numbers, looking at restaurant reviews from 250 countries. Auckland ranked alongside hipster meccas Amsterdam and Portland as the best place to go if gluten is off the menu.

The city scored four out of five stars for its 180 gluten-free friendly establishments and the company cited the rise of the food trend's popularity as the reason for compiling the list.

This came as no surprise to The Grove's head chef Ben Bayly, who said special dietary requirements were growing as people understood more about eating healthily.

"I'm not surprised at all," he said. "We're a very forward-thinking city and we're like a mini Melbourne or Sydney or LA."

Demand for gluten, dairy and meat-free meals was here to stay and chefs needed to get on board, he said.

"We'll get times it feels like every second table has a dietary [demand] - whether it's gluten-free or coeliac."

Far from seeing special requests as a nuisance, Bayly and his team saw them as a challenge. "When we get a dietary all the guys in the kitchen fight over it because they get to do their own thing.

"We embrace it because it's the way the world's going."

People were paying good money for a meal out and deserved better than a stodgy meal or a dish with an ingredient removed.

At all his restaurants, Bayly used a Japanese lathe to create gluten-free pasta out of root vegetables. Veges like beetroot, celeriac, turnips, courgettes were turned on the lathe into spirals that mimic the shape of pasta.

"What we do is we just blanch it quickly to soften it and then we cut it into fettuccine or pappardelle.

"[Customers] just can't believe they've got a pasta made from vegetables."

Modern cooking leaned towards a fresher, healthier style that relied less on gluten anyway, Bayly said.

"It's definitely where the trend is. It's not a food fad, I just think people are more educated and people know now that eating carbs after lunch isn't so good for you if you want to lose weight."