Allergy and ingredient questions

This page walks through exactly what Dohos actually says in each of the real situations that come up — where the information comes from, what it does and doesn't promise, and what happens when a concern needs to travel with the order all the way to the kitchen.

01What the assistant actually says, and why it matters

The single most important thing to understand about how Dohos handles an ingredient question is where the answer actually comes from: the restaurant's own published menu information, relayed honestly, never independently checked against what's actually in the kitchen.

That second sentence isn't a disclaimer tacked on for legal comfort — it's the literal, accurate description of what's happening. Dohos reads back what the restaurant has published. It doesn't walk into the kitchen, doesn't inspect a label, and doesn't have any way to independently confirm that what's written matches what's actually being made that day.

And when there's no verified information to relay at all, Dohos doesn't fill the gap with a reasonable-sounding guess:

Worth understanding specifically because it's the opposite of what a caller might expect from a system that sounds confident and conversational the rest of the time. On an ingredient question with no real source behind it, Dohos doesn't reach for something plausible. It says plainly that it doesn't know, and points the caller at the one place that actually could — the restaurant itself.

02A dietary label is not a safety guarantee

A menu label like “vegan,” “vegetarian,” or “gluten-friendly” is real, useful information, and Dohos relays it exactly as the restaurant wrote it. What it never does is treat that label as something stronger than what it actually is:

The gap between a dietary label and an allergy guarantee is exactly the gap this line is built to close honestly. “Gluten-friendly” describes an intention about a recipe, not a promise about a shared fryer or a shared prep surface — the label and the cross-contact question are two genuinely different facts, and collapsing them into one reassurance would be exactly the kind of overclaim this design is built to avoid. Where the concern is serious enough to matter, the caller is offered whatever real confirmation option the restaurant actually has, rather than a label standing in for one.

03Availability is real, but provisional

An ingredient or item being listed as available is a genuine, current fact — and also one that can still change before an order is actually accepted. Dohos states both halves of that plainly rather than letting “available” sound more final than it is:

A caller building an order around a specific ingredient being present deserves to know that “currently available” is a real answer as of right now, not a locked-in promise for the rest of the call. It ties directly to how acceptance itself works — nothing is actually final until the restaurant accepts it, covered in full on Order status explained.

And when even the current-availability answer can't be verified, Dohos doesn't quietly assume either direction:

The caller still gets to move forward if they want to — the item goes on as a request, clearly marked as needing the restaurant's own confirmation, rather than being silently dropped or silently assumed to be fine.

04Carrying a concern into the final review

When a caller states a dietary or allergy instruction earlier in the call, that instruction has to actually survive all the way to the order review at the end, not get lost somewhere in between — and the review itself restates it plainly, along with an honest note about what has and hasn't actually been confirmed:

Three distinct facts are kept separate in that one line, on purpose: that the instruction was heard and will actually be sent, what the restaurant has or hasn't said back about it so far, and — stated directly — that none of that amounts to a safety guarantee. A caller who's stated a real concern gets to see exactly how much has actually been confirmed before deciding whether to submit the order as reviewed.

Put together, a real call shows how these pieces actually connect. A caller ordering for someone with a tree nut allergy asks about a specific sauce, and Dohos relays exactly what the restaurant's own menu information says about it, attributed honestly rather than stated as settled fact. The caller, still not satisfied, states the concern directly and asks that it be passed along. That instruction travels with the order, and when the order comes up for final review, the caller hears exactly what's been confirmed so far and exactly what hasn't — never a blanket reassurance standing in for an actual answer from the restaurant. Nothing about that exchange promised the dish was safe. What it did do is make sure the concern itself reached the kitchen in the caller's own words, verifiably.

05When it's a genuine emergency

Occasionally a call surfaces something more serious than an ingredient question — a caller describing symptoms, or a situation that sounds like it could be an active medical emergency rather than a question about what's in a dish. Escalation covers Dohos's one direct, unambiguous response to that moment in full: a caller is told plainly to reach real emergency services, not Dohos, which cannot dispatch help of that kind, and the order itself stops rather than continuing as though nothing had happened.

Dohos doesn't attempt to assess a medical situation, doesn't offer reassurance in place of real help, and doesn't keep the order flow running as if nothing had changed. It says directly what it is and isn't, and it stops to make room for what actually matters in that moment.

06What to do with a genuinely serious concern

None of the lines above exist to slow a routine question down — most ingredient and dietary questions get a fast, useful, accurately-sourced answer and the call continues normally. They exist for the smaller number of calls where the honest answer is “I don't know” or “that's not something I can promise,” because those are exactly the moments where a confident-sounding guess would do real harm.

For a caller with a genuine, serious allergy, the single most useful thing to know is that none of these lines is a substitute for confirming directly with the restaurant when the stakes are real. If a caller raises a serious concern and the available options — a stated instruction, a transfer, the restaurant's own confirmation channel — genuinely don't resolve it, that's worth treating as a real gap worth escalating directly, covered on When a call needs a person, rather than something to paper over.

It's worth training staff on this same distinction, since the pattern repeats at the counter as much as it does on a call: relaying what's published is genuinely useful and worth doing confidently, while promising a specific outcome — that a dish is safe for a specific person, that a preparation surface was never touched by an allergen — is a different kind of statement, one that requires actually knowing the answer rather than sounding sure of it.