707 Church St., 847-570-0100, flattopgrill.com

With the diagnosis of Celiac disease and the popularity of the gluten-free diet both on the rise, Flat Top Grill has proved itself best at serving to the growing gluten-free audience. The restaurant’s menu is headlined by an extensive create-your-own stir-fry option, which allows customers to customize their dishes however they please for a fixed price. The stir-fry bar allows for thousands of unique dishes with its abundance of ingredients — rice, noodles, any kind of vegetable you could want, homemade sauces and a mix of proteins. It’s a big competition to see who can stack their bowl the highest without spilling the contents.

Before the chef cooks up your food, you can select different colored sticks to denote you want extras — soups, lettuce wraps, cheese and this flat bread that is highly popular with my non-Celiac friends. But, selecting a white stick tells the chef you have a dietary restriction, and he’ll make your food in a pan separate from the hibachi-style grill where all the other stir-fry creations are cooked.

If you’re Celiac like me, your biggest fear when going out to eat is not knowing the ingredients in dishes and how the food is made in the kitchen. Among all the places with gluten-free options in Evanston, this is the only restaurant where you actually watch your food being made, so you can be 100 percent sure you won’t wake up tomorrow having your usual symptoms when you consume any gluten. You’re not forced to play it safe by ordering the salad, nor do you have to miss out on a fun dinner out with your friends because you’re unsure if you can eat anything on the menu. Flat Top allows you to recapture that freedom to eat that you haven’t experienced since before you were diagnosed with your gluten allergy.

— Paige Leskin