Allergen query at the pass
A guest at your 120-seat restaurant tells the waiter they have a severe peanut allergy and asks whether the satay chicken is safe. The waiter relays the question to you at the pass during a full service. The satay sauce is made in-house from a recipe that includes peanut butter, and the kitchen also uses a shared wok, shared tongs, and a shared fryer for several dishes. The guest has an EpiPen and says a previous reaction required hospitalisation. The restaurant has an allergen matrix, but it has not been updated since a menu change three weeks ago.
1. What do you tell the guest, and what do you do in the kitchen to manage the risk?
Read the worked answer
What you tell the guest
The honest answer is: the satay chicken is not safe for you. The sauce contains peanut, and the shared wok, tongs and fryer create a real cross-contact risk that you cannot eliminate at peak service. Do not soften this to keep the booking - a severe allergy with a prior hospitalisation is a life-threatening risk.
Say it plainly: 'The satay contains peanut and our kitchen uses shared equipment, so I can't guarantee it's free from peanut contact. I'd recommend a different dish, and I'll personally supervise its preparation.'
Kitchen actions
- Do not offer the satay 'without sauce'. The chicken may already have been cooked in the shared wok or handled with shared tongs. Removing the sauce does not remove the risk.
- Offer a safe alternative that avoids the shared wok, fryer, and tongs - for example, a dish cooked in a clean pan with clean utensils, or a simply grilled protein with a fresh salad.
- Use a clean station. Dedicated clean board, clean knife, clean pan, clean tongs, washed hands, and a clean bench area. If the fryer is shared, do not use it.
- Run the dish as a single ticket and have one chef prepare it start to finish so there is no handover confusion.
- Mark the ticket clearly with the allergen and the guest's table, and tell the runner which plate it is.
- Check the allergen matrix - but do not rely on it, because it is three weeks out of date. Verify ingredients from the actual recipe and packaging.
Why
The exam tests whether you can separate 'contains the allergen' from 'may contain the allergen through cross-contact'. Both matter, and at peak service the only safe answer for a severe allergy is a dish you can actually control.
2. The allergen matrix is out of date. What is your corrective action after service, and who is responsible?
Read the worked answer
After service - corrective action
- Take the matrix off the floor immediately or mark it 'UNVERIFIED - do not use' so no one relies on it. An out-of-date allergen document is worse than none, because it creates false confidence.
- Rebuild it from source. For every dish, check the actual recipe and every packaged ingredient's label, including sauces, stocks, marinades, and garnishes. Record the 14 declarable allergens per dish, plus any 'may contain' statements.
- Include cross-contact notes - shared fryer, shared wok, shared tongs, shared boards - because these are the risks staff most often miss.
- Verify the menu change from three weeks ago and check whether any other change slipped through. This is the root cause: a menu change without an allergen update.
- Add a control so it cannot recur: no menu change is signed off until the allergen matrix is updated and re-briefed. Make this part of the change process, not a one-off fix.
- Brief and train all staff, including floor staff, on the updated matrix and on how to ask the kitchen about allergens. Keep a training record.
- Record the incident - the guest query, your response, and the corrective action - in your food safety/incident log.
Who is responsible
- You (the chef/supervisor) own the matrix and the sign-off control. You are accountable for the document being current.
- The head chef/owner approves the change process and resources the training.
- Floor staff are responsible for asking the kitchen and never guessing.
- Every staff member is responsible for escalating allergen queries to a supervisor rather than answering from memory.
Why
The judgement being tested is that an allergen failure is a systems failure, not just a one-off mistake. Fixing the matrix is necessary; fixing the process that let it go stale is what prevents the next incident.