Aurelio's

Aurelio's pizza is a southside chain of pizza places. It seems once you go south of the city of Chicago Aurelio's are everywhere. Their gluten free menu isn't huge, or the pizza they offer, but it's tasty. We have enjoyed their pizza for a while now, their pizza sauce is a bit sweeter, and not like most typical Chicago pizzas. It makes it different, and a nice change when we are in the area as somewhere different to order from. I have had their salads in addition to their pizza. The first couple times we went I had the salad, because I was leery of how well their kitchen would handle allergies, since pizza places can be dicey.. You are in an environment with a lot of flour, a shared preparation space, and a lot of times shared ingredients.

There is no guarantee that the ladle that scooped and spread sauce on a glutenous pizza was cleaned before it was dipped and spread sauce on the next pizza, causing a contaminated container of sauce. You definitely have to be extra cautious when it comes to pizza's which stinks, cause pizza can be such a great comfort food!

We stopped at the Aurelio's pizza on Jefferson St. in Joliet, Saturday after spending the day at Chicagoland Speedway for the Nationwide NASCAR race. There aren't many gluten free options at the track, and Saturday, it was a party, the only options were pre-made burgers and hotdogs on buns.

We were pretty tired by the time we got to dinner, and a pizza sounded good. The pizza is only 7 inches. 

The service was lacking in general part of our group ordered salad and appetizers and they never showed up. The pizza was tasty the crust was a bit dense, but wasn't the worst I had tried, I actually ate the entire pizza. Again it was only 7 inches, I've had pasta dishes larger!

I felt fine, all was good, my pizza had sausage, olives and garlic. The larger, Non-gluten free pizza next to it, that the boys ordered was sausage, olives, and mushrooms. We were good until midnight... And I felt like I might explode in stomach and back pain. I honestly don't know the last time I was in so much pain, and couldn't tell which end things might explode from... I briefly thought it could be food poisoning, but I assume the sausage on the guys pizza was the same sausage on mine, and they were watching TV in the other room, all peachy keen drinking beer. Sadly I was glutened. I was out of it most of the next day. It was only the 2nd time I'd been glutened that my reaction was getting extremely violently ill. It's days like this I wish there was an easy solution, a pill or something to make the reaction less violent and horrible. On my rating scale, I give them 2 dragonflies, because there was definite cross contamination on the pizza. From now on I'll stick to salads here, since we end up in this area a lot, and there aren't a lot of good dining choices that offer safe options.