Feeding Ourselves

It used to be that Disney was simply filled with food stands selling standard carnival/Americana type foods.  The quality was there, but the variety was lacking.  Today Disney world has become well known for the variety of restaurants available, and even boasts some world-class eateries.  Best of all they managed to do this without simply eliminating the classic treats you’d expect.  Needless to say the challenge of Disney World is not finding a place to eat, instead it's trying to pick which place you want to eat.

After reading several websites dedicated to the food at Disney World you start to find some meals and treats you don't want to miss.  So the first goal is to list some of theses treats and keep track of where to find them. The intended plan is to pick up all the meals and treats as we visit each park, but that's not really that simple.

The first problem about trying every restaurant and snack item at each park that we want is all the parks are not equal. Some parks have great snacks, but not so many meal options; other parks may have many lunch choices, but almost no dinner options. So you may find yourself in a park stuck with a dinner that's OK, but at another park there's a million dinner options.  The best example of this difference is between Epcot and Hollywood Studios.  While Hollywood Studios has a couple of OK meal selections, for the most part it's just a lot of the standard American food.  Epcot on the other hand has such a huge selection of food options that it holds an annual food and drink show.

So even if we manage to pick out nice meals at all of the parks, we can't forget the resorts.  So many of the resorts have amazing restaurants in them, which are exclusive and found nowhere else in Disney World.  So if you want to sample something from a resort, you may have to leave a park for lunch and come back. I'm not too sure if we'll have time for many of these adventures without missing out on park attractions.

While the first two problems aren't really that big a deal, making sure we have reservations is.  I've read that some of the more popular restaurants can be filled up 180 days in advance.  Since neither Allison nor I are experts on all of the restaurants, we're never really sure where to book something.  All the advice we have is from Disney food websites, and that can be difficult.  Some food writers have different tastes than Allison and myself, and it's not like we have any range of comparison since most of these writers only write about Disney food.

I think our plan so far is to pick a few of the popular restaurants and make a reservation.  We most certainly want at least one character dinning experience as well.  Other than that we'll hunt and peck, and hope that we have some great meals.