The Food and Wine Festival at Disneyland is happening right now. This has been an annual event that I’ve been able to check out for the past few years. While I don’t drink, I always love seeing the fun and unique food offerings and it makes a really fun day at Disneyland. And with the food pass you can get, it actually makes things not too expensive. So of course I had to check it out again this year.
I went with my friend Dani last week, and it was the perfect spring day. We’ve been having warmer weather, but it wasn’t too hot and we had a gorgeous blue sky with all the flowers in bloom!
The main reason we went to Disney was for the Food and Wine Festival, so we immediately went over to California Adventure to get a food pass and start looking at what each booth had to offer. The food pass allows you to get 8 items and we figured that we would be splitting pretty much everything. There were a few things we each wanted that the other didn’t, but it all balanced out.
There were a few repeat things from the past few years and several new things. We tried our best to vary things up and I think we got a good mix.
My favorite things were the asparagus Caesar (which was a repeat from the past, but they added chicken this year), the pepperoni egg rolls, the corn nuggets with bacon, and the garlic mac and cheese (which was another repeat).
Dani got the ghost pepper mac and cheese (I don’t eat spicy food) and she said it was good and tasted like a spicy version of the garlic mac and cheese we split.
Not everything was a winner for us. The two things we got that we didn’t love were the fried artichoke hearts and the parmesan salt and vinegar wings. The artichoke hearts were a repeat thing but they were just soggy and didn’t have a ton of flavor. The chicken wings were fine, but we couldn’t really taste parmesan or salt and vinegar. They were good wings, but we were expecting something different.
There was also a new thing this year with how you could order food. Instead of having to go to every booth to order what is there, you could order anything at any booth and just bring your receipt to the correct booth to pick up the food. We didn’t try this until we were using our last food pass tabs and we ordered a bunch of different things at one booth. It worked out fine for most things, but we did discover the downfall to doing this.
We ordered the beef tenderloin slider at a booth other than the one that serves it. When we went over to the booth to pick it up, we were told they were sold out and that they wouldn’t have any more for about 30 minutes. We had the option to wait or we could get anything else from any other booth. We didn’t really want to wait 30 minutes for something that we’ve had before, so we decided to go through the options and see what we wanted to get instead.
Since everything we got had been savory, we decided to get something sweet. They had a popsicle duo that had lime and strawberry at a booth. Dani took the lime one and I took the strawberry one. They were good, but nothing special. I probably wouldn’t have picked it normally, but we just wanted something easy and it was a good choice to end the time at the Food and Wine Festival with.
While we were on the California Adventure side, the only ride we did was Toy Story Mania. We didn’t want to do any of the fast rides since we were eating so much food, but we also didn’t want to spend time on rides we could do whenever when the food offerings aren’t always there.
We headed over to the Disneyland side thinking we’d do a few more rides, but when we got there the first thing we noticed was how nice it was with the flowers and trees in bloom. The castle is being worked on so it’s covered by a mural, but that didn’t take away from how pretty it was.
We did Pirates of the Caribbean and then we were going to go over to Fantasyland to do the Storybook Canal Boats. And as we were walking, we saw yet another gorgeous Disney view.
By the time we got to the boats, the sun was down and I was hoping the little houses would all be lit up. But they didn’t have as many lights as I seemed to remember. It wasn’t bad, just different from what I thought we’d be seeing.
We did a lot of walking around and wandering through different parts of Disneyland. It wasn’t empty, but it wasn’t as crowded as we thought it might be. We had a few other rides we wanted to do, but we weren’t having good luck and it seemed like the few things we thought about doing happened to be down when we were over there.
And even though we had a day full of food, of course there is always still room for Dole Whips. I had the orange/raspberry one which I think is my favorite combination.
After the Dole Whips, we started to head out of the park because the fireworks were starting. We didn’t want to be stuck in the crowds exiting the park when they finished, and we managed to be just at the gates as the crowd started heading that way. We still hung out in Downtown Disney doing some shopping, but we didn’t stay too late since we both had early mornings the next day.
Considering that the main point of this Disney day was to check out the Food and Wine Festival, I would say it was a success! It would have been nice to do a few more rides, but since we can do those any other day we are there I was ok with missing out on a few things we wanted to do. I’d love to go back to try a few more things at the different food booths, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make it back before it ends. But if I can’t, then I know I’ll just be back to check it out next year!
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