Hibachi Catering with Allergies: Gluten-Free, Vegan & Shellfish

Yes. Hibachi handles dietary restrictions better than most catering formats, because everything is cooked to order in front of you rather than plated in a kitchen an hour earlier.

We do gluten-free across the whole menu including the noodles, vegan cooked separately with tofu, and we manage seafood and shellfish allergies through cook order. Here's exactly how each works.

Gluten-free

The whole menu can be made gluten-free, including the noodles.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Soy sauce is the usual gluten problem at a hibachi station, and most caterers can swap that out — but noodles are where it typically stops, and guests get told to skip them. We don't have that gap. A gluten-free guest gets the same plate as everyone else, not a reduced version of it.

Tell us how many gluten-free guests when you book so we bring the right quantities.

Vegetarian and vegan

Vegan meals are cooked separately, and we carry tofu as the protein.

Cooking separately is the point. A griddle that has been searing chicken and steak all evening is not a vegan surface, and there's no version of scraping it that makes it one. Separate preparation is the only honest way to serve a vegan guest at a live station, so that's what we do.

Vegetarian is more straightforward — the vegetables, rice, noodles, salad, and edamame are already there, and we build the plate around them properly rather than handing someone a side dish and calling it dinner.

Seafood and shellfish allergies

This is the one that matters most, and it's worth explaining the mechanism rather than just saying we can accommodate it.

Shrimp is on every plate in our standard package, and a hibachi griddle is a single shared surface. You can't run a live station with a permanently separate shellfish zone — the surface is the surface.

What you can control is order. We cook all seafood last, and shellfish absolutely last. Everything that has to stay shellfish-free — chicken, steak, vegetables, rice, noodles — is cooked and off the surface before shrimp or any other shellfish touches it.

That's the standard approach in professional kitchens and it's the right one for a live griddle. Sequencing does the work that separate equipment would otherwise do.

Tell us about a shellfish allergy when you book, not when we arrive. Cook order is planned before service starts, and once shrimp has been on the surface we can't undo it mid-event.

What to tell us, and when

Everything above depends on knowing in advance. Cook order, separate vegan preparation, and gluten-free quantities are all decided during prep, not improvised on site.

• How many guests have each restriction

• Whether an allergy is a severe allergy or a preference — those are different problems and we'll treat them differently

• Any restriction not listed here. If we can't do it safely we'll tell you rather than guess.

A caterer who says yes to every restriction without asking follow-up questions is not paying attention. Severity, cross-contact tolerance, and guest count all change how we run the station.

Why hibachi is better than most catering for this

With tray catering, everything was cooked hours ago in a kitchen you'll never see, and by the time it reaches your event nobody on site can tell you what touched what. Your only option is trusting a label.

At a hibachi station the cooking happens in front of you. You can see the order things go on in, you can talk to the chef directly, and a guest with a restriction can ask a question and get an answer from the person holding the spatula.

That transparency is worth something to anyone who has spent an event quietly worrying about what's in the food.

Sushi and dietary restrictions

Our sushi is made to order rather than sold as fixed platters, which makes restrictions straightforward. All vegetarian, no shellfish, no spicy — you tell us and that's what gets rolled.

One thing we won't do: raw shellfish in summer. Vibrio bacteria multiply in warm water and roughly 80% of infections occur between May and October. That's a call we make regardless of what's requested.

Ask us

Text or call with your date, guest count, and what restrictions you're working around. If there's something we can't do safely, we'll say so.

Call or text 401-402-9616.

More on how we run a station is in what makes good hibachi catering, and our sushi handling is covered in is catered sushi safe.

SIFU Hibachi & Sushi Catering — kitchens in Cranston and Providence, RI.