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Two Asbury Park restaurants owned and operated by Asbury-based Smith Group are on a path to achieve accreditation from the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness in gluten-free food service training.

Gluten-Free Resource Education and Awareness Training, or GREAT kitchens, provides restaurants with training for all front-of-house and back-of-house personnel on safe gluten-free food preparation and handling practices. Gluten is a protein found in wheat, rye and barley that those who are diagnosed with Celiac disease are allergic to.

Staff at Goldie’s, the group’s vegan restaurant in downtown Asbury Park [shown above], went through on-site GREAT training Tuesday, Aug. 19. All of the staff must now undergo post-training testing and score above 80 percent to be issued a certificate for successfully completion of the program and the restaurant will be available for full accreditation, according to Fredrica Vilardi, Smith’s creative director.

Vilardi, 36, worked for Smith as Porta’s head pizzaiola prior to being diagnosed with Celiac’s disease over a year and a half ago, she said.

“That was, of course, very shocking and devastating,” she said.

She knew at that moment huge changes were in order, since exposure to glutenous flour was nearly impossible working at the restaurant, she said.

“When you make pizza you end up completely covered in flour,” she said. “You’re even breathing it in, and all it takes is [ingesting] a sixteenth of a breadcrumb to make you sick.”

Goldie’s will be certified first and then staff at Pascal & Sabine will undergo training, Vilardi said, since a lot of baking happens in the group’s French brasserie.

“With Goldies, it’s vegan and naturally a lot of people go to Goldie’s who have allergies, so it would be nice to put this in place to let the gluten-free and Celiac community have some place to go that is safe,” she said.

Since the training at Goldie’s, Shannon Murray, who runs the kitchen there, made a few phone calls to their food distributors and has already found the restaurant may need to swap out a few items to ensure all of the products that are labeled gluten-free by the distributor are not subject to cross contamination in the packing process, Vilardi said.

“There is a lot to learn, it’s not as cut and dry as not using products that contain gluten,” she said.

Knowing how to read food labels properly and understanding instances where cross-contact can take place, like someone touching plate or wiping a plate with a rag that had four on it, is also important, she said.

Additionally, avoiding gaps in communication between front- and back-of-house staff is an imperative part of the training as well, and, ideally, Vilardi would like to see a special gluten-free menu made available.

A recent positive dining experience in Philadelphia sparked the former piazziola’s interest in attaining the accreditation at the two restaurants.

“The servers and staff spent a lot of time going over menu and it was clear that there was communication throughout the whole restaurant,” she said, “I felt taken care of, and I felt safe because of how they were treating me.”

Due to an “overabundance of possible cross-contamination situations,” Smith Group’s other restaurants in Asbury Park, Porta and Brickwall Tavern and Dining Room, will not seek the same certification, she said.

Kind Burgers in Fair Haven is the closest restaurant that has been certified in the program, said Beckee Moreland, director of the GREAT Kitchens program.

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