Bryan Tublin, the owner & co-founder of Kitava

Kitava is 100% free from gluten, dairy, soy, peanuts, refined sugar, and seed oils. Those items aren't even in our kitchen. We don't source any ingredients that can contain those items. So that's something that off the bat, lots of people feel safe and comfortable ordering anything on our menu because if they have reactions to things like dairy or soy or peanuts, they don't have to worry about it.
As far as other top 9 allergens, we do list on our website and every location has a binder accessible to staff and guests that lists every single ingredient in every single item on our menu. That allows us to accommodate and make folks who have allergies or restrictions feel comfortable ordering anything that they like because they can take a look at the ingredients if they're not sure. For example, some folks have a tree nut allergy, and some folks with tree nut allergies are sensitive to coconut because coconut's actually a tree nut; others are not.
We like to ask folks if they're asking lots of questions, “Is there anything you're trying to avoid?” If they say something like tree nuts, we like to give them the ingredient binder so that they can take a look for themselves and make sure that there's not anything that they're not supposed to eat.
At a high level, that's the way that we accommodate allergies and restrictions: we have a default set of ingredients that we don't even source, and then for other things, we are just really transparent about what is and is not in each dish.

The first thing that I'd recommend is to use our Build Your Own Bowl section of the menu. That's the section that allows people to customize all of the ingredients and components in their dish. It's one of our most popular ways that people order from Kitava is they build their own bowl, and it's specifically geared towards folks with allergies and restrictions. For example, you can build a bowl that has, you pick your own base. Let's say you just wanted a simple carbohydrate that is very basic in bare bones and doesn't have any spices or any other ingredients added to it. You would choose the jasmine rice as your base, and then you could pick a protein that doesn't have lots of other things added to it as well. You can go with our chicken breast, our marinated chicken breast, which has a very simple marinade of lemon, water, and salt. That's keeping it clean on the base and the protein side.
For the vegetables, this is where the vegetables and the sauces are where things can get more complicated in terms of the preparation method. That's where you can pick ingredients that are very straightforward and simple and don't have a lot to it. For example, our roasted carrots, our roasted rainbow carrots, fairly straightforward in terms of salt, olive oil, some herbs, but there's no garlic and no tree nuts. That's a pretty clean option there, and same with our fingerling potatoes. A very clean option. You can request getting the broccoli without oil and garlic, if you want to avoid garlic. There are ways to order the side veggie components as well to make it simpler.
As far as sauces go, we always recommend either our lemon vinaigrette because that is a very simple vinaigrette with no garlic, no onions, no tree nuts, no egg. That's a very simple option for someone who has lots of allergies and is trying to avoid hidden—again, for us, it’s not hidden, because we try to be transparent about it—but things in sauces that they might overlook. Or you can choose no sauce if you're eating at home and you want to just add some simple olive oil and vinegar at home to your order. We can also bring that to you at your table if you request it, and you could just order no sauce. So the Build Your Own Bowl is something that I highly recommend for people that have lots of restrictions or they're just trying to avoid things that they might not think of.
Aside from that, I'd also say our citrus salad is a good option. That avoids lots of those things as well. I hesitate to make broad stroke statements like “these menu items are always going to avoid things” because I know that everyone has their own needs. I want people to make sure that they are okay and they look at the ingredients. But generally speaking, the citrus salad with our grilled salmon or with our chicken breast is a pretty clean option as far as avoiding allergens.
Again, lots of our veggie sides can be fairly clean. Our fried plantains as well, is a really good option. I would avoid the chipotle aioli that it comes with because it does have egg. If you're trying to avoid eggs, you might not get the chipotle aioli, but the plantains are a really good option. It's basically just plantains cooked in organic, sustainable Fera fruit oil, which is a type of palm oil. Our fries are actually good options as well. Again, looking at the ingredients of the ketchup that it comes with will be necessary just to make sure you're not eating anything that you're trying to avoid there.

For things like tree nuts or fish and eggs, things that may be an issue for some folks, we do try to minimize as much as possible. Of course, in a kitchen that does contain ingredients, it's never possible to say there’s a 100% guarantee that there won't be cross-contamination, which is why, for those other ingredients, we don't even source them because it's easier for us to just say, hey, we're free from this stuff.
But we do take proper food safety steps to ensure that food is handled correctly. When we're prepping one ingredient or item, we're washing hands or using gloves before we change to the next task. We also sanitize prep areas between tasks and between items as well, to make sure that we're doing the best we can to avoid that cross-contamination.
The way that we position things in our line when we're plating food, we try to cluster ingredients that are similar together and separate ingredients away from nuts, for example, or seeds, where we know that folks might want to avoid that. We try to have ingredients that contain nuts and seeds more together and separate from other items that don’t contain nuts and seeds, just to make sure that as ingredients are being grabbed on the line, when they're being prepared for plating, they're not interacting with each other as much as possible. We try to take all those steps to separate things as much as we can.

We don't have any wheat in our kitchen, so we don't have gluten-containing flour. We do have our own gluten-free flour mixes that we make. As far as the fryers go, we have a separate vegetable fryer from a meat fryer. Everything that contains a vegetable—like fries or a potato—that's going to be a vegan option that's going to be cooked in the veggie fryer. All of our meat proteins, like our chicken nuggets, are primarily going to be cooked in the meat fryer.
There are other ingredients that do contain our gluten flour mixes that are cooked in the veggie fryer. For example, we have our cauliflower bites that are breaded, with again, a house made gluten-free flour mix. That is cooked in the veggie fryer. That is worth noting if that's a concern. If there's anything in that breaded product that you might want to avoid, then you don't want to order fries because of that. It is worth noting they are cooked in that same vegetable fryer.
I've heard different things from folks. I heard they're not worried, not too concerned about that fryer oil causing the cross-contamination. But again, it is just worth noting. For example, our cauliflower bites contain the batter that we make ourselves, which contains cassava flour, garlic powder, granulated onion, paprika, oregano, cumin, and salt. If there are any of those ingredients you're trying to avoid, like any kind of garlic-containing product or any kind of onion-containing product, and you're worried about the oil causing cross-contamination, you would want to avoid anything that's cooked in the fryer. But again, that's all transparent in our ingredient doc. You can look and see what are the fried items and what are the ingredients in those items if you want to avoid it.