Savor Scout › Eating out with a restriction › keto and low-carb
Eating out on keto or low-carb
Eating low-carb in restaurants is mostly easy and occasionally sabotaged, and the sabotage is nearly always sugar in something savoury rather than an obvious carbohydrate you could see coming.
What actually goes wrong
Sugar is a standard seasoning in far more savoury cooking than people expect. Barbecue sauce, teriyaki, most Thai dishes, sweet and sour anything, ketchup-based sauces, many marinades, balsamic glazes and a great deal of salad dressing all carry meaningful sugar. A sauced dish is where the carbohydrate goes when there is no bread on the plate.
The second source is the thickener. Sauces and gravies are thickened with flour or cornstarch, breading adds more than people estimate, and battered anything is substantially carbohydrate by weight.
The third thing worth knowing is that restaurant portions of protein and fat are generous while portions of vegetables often are not, so the practical move is usually to order a protein plainly and add a vegetable side rather than to look for a dish that happens to fit.
What to ask, and how
- Ask for it grilled, with the sauce on the side — The single most useful sentence. It converts a large share of menus.
- Swap the starch for a vegetable — Almost universally possible, usually free, and rarely offered unprompted.
- Ask what is in the dressing — Most house dressings and vinaigrettes contain sugar; oil and vinegar or lemon does not.
- Avoid anything described as glazed, sticky, crispy or teriyaki — All four words indicate sugar, starch, or both.
- Ask about the marinade for grilled meat — The usual hidden sugar source at barbecue and Asian restaurants.
Which cuisines make this easier
- Easy — Steakhouses and grills. Korean barbecue, where meat is cooked plainly at the table — watch the marinated cuts. Brazilian churrascaria. Greek and Levantine grills, where the meat, salads and yoghurt dishes are all straightforwardly low-carb. Japanese sashimi. Most seafood restaurants.
- Harder — Anywhere built on a starch — Italian, Mexican outside of fajitas and grilled plates, most Chinese, most Indian, sandwich shops, and barbecue with sweet sauce, where the meat is fine and the sauce is not.
How Savor Scout helps
Low-carb and keto work as dietary terms, and Savor Scout reads menus and reviews for them. In practice the better search here describes the cooking rather than the diet — grilled protein, sauce on the side, vegetable sides — because those are things the matcher can actually find on a menu, and they are the things that determine whether a restaurant works.
What this does not do. Sugar in a marinade is not on any menu. The sauce-on-the-side request handles most of it without needing anyone to look anything up.
Search keto and low-carb options near you →
Cuisines worth reading up on
steak, Korean food, seafood, Greek food
Situations where this comes up: what to eat after a workout, where to take a client to dinner, where to take the team for lunch.