Let’s Talk About Gluten

Hi, I’m Tom.

If you’ve visited Groke, there’s a good chance I’ve taken your order or made your coffee. I’m a bit camera shy, so I don’t pop up on our socials much, but I wanted to talk about something important.

Three years ago I started feeling ill. I’ll spare you the details, but it wasn’t fun.

Someone suggested cutting out gluten. I did, and the symptoms disappeared.

So did most of my food options.

I’ve been vegetarian my whole life, and suddenly supermarkets felt hostile. Shelves full of food I couldn’t eat. Even the “gluten free” sections were mostly meat-based. Eating out wasn’t much better. “Gluten free options” often meant chips, or nothing. Trying to get clear allergen info from a takeaway was nearly impossible.

It might sound small, but when you eat multiple times a day, losing your options is exhausting. And the worst part wasn’t even that. It was the guilt. Feeling like my restrictions made things harder for my partner, my friends, anyone I ate with.

It was brutal.

Around that time, I was already working towards opening a place of my own. After ten years working my way up through the speciality coffee and food scene, from pot wash to barista to GM, me and my partner Abby finally got the chance in 2024.

That became Groke.

We always knew it would be a coffee and brunch spot. That idea started back in 2013 when I somehow blagged a barista job in Melbourne’s St Kilda area and had poached eggs for the first time. I fell in love with that atmosphere, and I wanted to bring a bit of that with me wherever I went.

So when we started building the menu with our head chef Joe, that was the focus. Great food. A proper mix of meat, veggie, and vegan dishes. I didn’t expect to be able to eat everything. I never really could anyway.

Then Joe showed me the near-finished menu and casually mentioned, “By the way, this can all be gluten free. We just swap the bread.”

That was the moment it clicked.

From there, the whole team got involved. Checking every ingredient, rethinking dishes, removing risks. Abby started developing gluten free bakes that are now a huge part of what we do.

No one was told to do it. No one had to. They just cared.

And what they built was kind of amazing. A brunch menu where coeliacs aren’t an afterthought, with no compromises, no inflated prices, and no sad alternatives. Just food.

We made a decision early on not to call ourselves a “gluten free restaurant.” We didn’t want to put people off or box ourselves in. Instead, we wanted to be a place where you can come with a group, everyone finds something they want, and no one feels like the difficult one.

So we built systems to avoid cross-contamination. We reduced gluten in the kitchen to basically just bread. We trained the team properly. We take every allergy seriously, with no eye-rolling and no assumptions. We can’t promise a completely risk-free environment for every allergy, no kitchen can, but we can promise that we understand what we’re doing and we will always be honest about what we can and can’t serve.

Since opening, we’ve quietly built a following. Coeliacs finding us by chance, telling their friends, and coming back with family. And that’s been incredible.

But here’s the thing. We haven’t talked about it enough.

We were so focused on not being defined by gluten free that we have probably failed to reach people who actually need it. People in Sheffield who are struggling like I was, not knowing where they can go for a proper brunch without stress. And that is on us.

So this is me trying to fix that.

Groke is built so that almost everyone can eat. If you’re coeliac, gluten intolerant, or just trying to avoid gluten, you are not an afterthought here. You are exactly who we had in mind.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you.