Hey all! Just popping in to give a rundown of what my PrincessGF and I experienced on our short vacation last week. We did a special two-night thing just to hit V+A and the 2nd Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party of the year. Halloween pro-tip: we found some great vegan makeups (and some from woman-owned companies) for our Jack & Sally costumes. Florida pro-tip: heavy makeup is not a great idea in florida head & humidity! I'm just gonna assume that stinging sensation was magic going directly into my eyes.
Victoria & Albert's: 7 courses of vegan perfection. It was $570 including 4 glasses of wine (2 for each of us) and the tip, so it had better be perfect. And it is. I won't do a play-by-play but they cater to your every need to the point where any time you sit, someone will pull your chair and place your napkin in your lap. This place is also great with special requests so we were kindly escorted to an appropriate viewing location for Happily Ever After between our main course and our sorbet palate-cleanser. Brought our glasses of wine with us and had a wonderful moment before we went back and had amazing dessert. Also, vegans will be happy to note that a few of V+A's after-dinner chocolates are vegan including the famous alcohol-soaked chocolate-covered cherries. So good. Chef Amy came by our table to check in with us and it was fun to hear about the selection process for the mushrooms that evening. Hen of the Wood may require discussion, but putting real perfect shaved truffles on a dish is never a bad idea! Brava, Chef! (Side note: I have memorized a small selection of generally-available vegan wines and recognized a couple on the wine list. I didn't speak to their sommelier, so I don't know if they can make those kind of recommendations. You may want to bring your phone, so you can google as needed while looking at the wine list, unless you don't care about isinglass in your wine.
Gasparilla Grill: THEY HAVE A NEW VEGAN/VEGETARIAN MENU!!! We were super happy with this place. Found a great chick-un sandwich here (with vegan cheese and a berry jam -- very good and somewhat unique!) and they do great breakfast work too. Princess GF liked the avocado toast (though she removed some extraneous onion) and, though it's not on the vegan menu, I love that they can do vegan Mickey Waffles and they have Smart Balance vegan butter out in the condiments area. Note about the mickey waffles: Bob's Redmill is a weird mix and your waffles won't feel like any waffle you've ever had -- very dense and almost too chewey. Unless you're a die-hard mickey fan or a die-hard waffle fan, you probably won't like `em.
Captain Cooks, Polynesian Resort: This is the sort of thing you read forums like this one to avoid! We waited in line and then cheerily asked the cashier/order taker if a something like the noodle dish could be made vegan. She looked like she was going to laugh when she said "the only things we can do vegan are white rice and steamed veggies." That sucked. That should have warranted a complaint to someone so Disney knows that's not okay, but I was too busy trying to calm down (and feed) PrincessGF so that got placed on a back-burner and then left unresolved. Suffice it to say that PrincessGF will not let me schedule a trip to stay at Poly anytime soon! (There were more expletives in her version of that decree.) Upshot here is that Captain Cooks is a bummer for vegans and it makes me sad that Disney allows a quick service place without vegan options to exist. Just stupid and thoughtless and even noted carnivore Anthony Bourdain would make fun of their chef for a major oversight like that.
Grand Floridian Room Service: We got room service breakfast while packing on check-out morning. I feel so dumb for not having called them sooner. As soon as I said "vegan" to the CM on the phone, she immediately got a chef who was so nice and began making suggestions such as a Tofu Scramble. I got Mickey Waffles again (it's kinda my thing -- 2nd favorite breakfast after Port Orleans French Quarter's vegan Beignets!) and PrincessGF had a beautiful fruit plate and a totally passable plate of hashbrowns (hey, it's her vacation too, I don't judge since she doesn't judge my mickey waffle obsession!) I have no doubt that GF Room Service could have done something pretty special any time day or night. I think staying at Grand Floridian was the best choice I made about this trip. Disney service is good, but nowhere else can you get this level of caring about every aspect of your experience.
Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party: Allergy Friendly Treats are awesome. They loaded us up on Enjoy Life chocolates and cookies as those were the only vegan options. They also gave us some of the craft kits though I doubt the sticky bits that allow you to put the crafts together are actually vegan. I get it: they're thinking about food allergies and not noticing that my shoes aren't leather -- it's my problem, not theirs -- so we just set those aside to give out to trick-or-treaters at our house this year.
During
MNSSHP, we needed to eat. I had the option to make a Be Our Guest reservation (their ratatouille is great and very similar to the one designed by Chef Keller for the eponymous movie) but I didn't want to "waste party time" with a sit-down meal. That was patently dumb and I've been kicking myself since. This trip I leaned a simple truth: as a vegan, if I don't have a solid plan, I will lose more time tracking down something to eat that than I would lose being waited on.
Columbia Harbor House: We had our hearts set on the vegan chili for months before the trip. Naturally, it closed early despite being listed as one of the few restaurants open during the Halloween Party. Huge bummer and I wish there were a way Disney could push that info out through the app. When I'm hungry and I'm placed on the back-foot like that...it's not good.
Pecos Bill's: We got a Columbia Harbor House CM to call over to Pecos Bill's to make sure they were open before hiking over there (it's not far, but we were upset about missing out on our chili!) This is where it got not-so-good. Pecos Bill's cashier says nearly everything can be made vegan by leaving off cheese. That sounds incorrect to me so I ask to look at ingredients lists. There was some questionable stuff in the tortillas but the tortilla chips look fine so I'm saying "I think our best bet is probably the nachos without cheese" and the cashier is basically arguing with me telling me we can get burritos or whatnot. Super weird and un-Disney. After talking it over with PrincessGF, we decide we're definitely doing the "nachos without cheese" by which we mean "tortilla chips with black beans on top." I tell that to the cashier who says something to the effect of "oh, I can't help you now because I've just called a manager to assist you." Okay...a few minutes of holding up the line later, the manager shows up and says the only reliably vegan thing is tortilla chips with black beans on them! Sure. Sounds fine. We'll have that, please. We pay and they ask us to step up to the window to get our food. We stand there for a few minutes and a CM brings us something that is just obviously meat-covered and not ours. We say "sorry, that's not us" and the girl takes our receipt and says "I'll check on this". She disappears into the back, and ultimately never came back to our window. At this point, the people behind us are getting served and we have to squeeze out of the way so they can be passed our tray. If you've never been to Pecos Bill's, the queue setup is most similar to Cosmic Rays with multiple queues in close quarters going to many food-service windows. There's just no place to stand out of the way if you're waiting for food that's not being served in the order it was requested. People had to squeeze by us (or rudely push in a few cases) all while staring at us like "what's wrong with these people?" It was disheartening. Even moreso when we'd ultimately endured about 20 minutes of that for our sad little cardboard bowl of chips and beans to be delivered by a different cast member who seemed confused as to why the other CM would take our receipt and never come back with it. Yes, we can pile the chips up with salsa and guac at the totally decent toppings bar. No, that doesn't fix the situation at all in my mind. Maybe my perspective could have been different if I'd planned on eating at Pecos Bill's and had an idea of what I was in for. In my reality at the time, it felt so un-Disney -- so far from anything I'd ever experienced from Disney -- that I was very nearly crying into our chips and all I could think was "well, I guess disney is over for me now." Not a good feel. I did eventually feel better after I let myself enjoy some more of the Party, but I learned a huge Disney lesson: reservations and sitting down to eat are NEVER a waste of time for a vegan. I'm gonna lose that time anyway tracking down food and then waiting for it to be cooked. Better to just make the plan in the first place and avoid the struggle and bad feels.
I hope some of that helps someone! I'm not a local with an AP, but I'm hoping to go back in a few months and I'll be sure to report my latest vegan adventures! Thanks for reading!
. If you are in Epcot for the Food and Wine Festival there are plenty of yummy options for vegetarians!
