Tasting our way through Disney California Adventure’s Food and Wine Festival 2018
I love food and living in Southern California has absolutely spoiled me. Disney California Adventure’s annual food and wine festival (and, now seasonal Festival of the Holidays and Lunar New Year celebration) is always a fun way to spend some time in the park trying some dishes that you wouldn’t normally find in a theme park setting. Of course, living in So Cal, the offerings can kind of be a mixed bag — things that are offered up as unique or exotic might be commonplace in these parts, but the hope is always that Disney’s offerings bring a fresh or unique twist to the table. I joined our friends from MouseInfo at Disneyland during the festival’s opening weekend to sample some of this year’s offerings and see how 2018’s Food and Wine stacks up.
While you’ll find a few offerings in Hollywood Land, the bulk of the Food and Wine Festival takes place along Disney California Adventure’s parade route between Carthay Circle Theater and Paradise Garden. The festival consists of Festival Marketplace booths, beer and wine gardens, live entertainment, culinary demonstrations, signature events with celebrity chefs and winemakers, specialty shopping, and more.
Festival Marketplace booths in Hollywood Land and along the park’s parade route feature snacks, drinks, and sweet treats that play into each booth’s respective theme or spotlight ingredient. For full menus, check out the Disney Parks Blog or find menus in your official Disneyland Resort smartphone app.
- Nuts About Cheese: Gourmet nuts and cheeses, mimosas, wines
- LAstyle: Fusion snacks and drinks inspired by California’s diverse cultures.
- The Brewhouse: A selection of beers, ciders, and Festival Punch
- California Craft Brews: The festival’s popular White Cheddar Lager Soup and a wide selection of craft beers
- Peppers Cali-ente: Snacks and drinks with a spicy California kick.
- Uncork California: California wines
- Strawberry Patch: Strawberry-inspired snacks and drinks
- Avocado Time: Avocado-inspired snacks and drinks
- Eat Your Greens: Fresh veggie snacks, sangria, kombucha
- Citrus Grove: Citrus-infused dishes and citrusy drinks
- I ♥ Artichokes: Artichoke snacks and wines
- Cluck-a-Doodle-Moo: Beef and chicken, beers, and more
- Off the Cob: Corn-inspired dishes and drinks
- Garlic Kissed: Garlic-infused snacks and drinks
If you’re an Annual Passholder, the best bang for your buck is to grab a Sip and Savor Pass. The Sip and Savor passes are $45 each and are available at any of the locations where Food and Wine Festival-themed merchandise is sold. The pass good for your choice of any eight Marketplace items, excluding alcohol and souvenir items. If you’re looking for some value, the math here works out — most savory dishes run between $6-8 (with one cheese sampler costing $14!) — so, if you order up dishes priced around $6 or higher, then you’re more than getting your money’s worth. With that said, you should pay out-of-pocket for desserts and save your Sip and Savor Pass for the pricier savory dishes.
At Peppers Cali-ente, the Jalapeño Popper Mac & Cheese with Bacon ($7.50) was one of the better dishes we sampled this year. The fried jalapeños give the macaroni and cheese a nice kick and the bacon added some nice texture and extra saltiness to a pretty good mac & cheese. I’m usually not a fan of the macaroni and cheese dishes served up at Food and Wine but this one is pretty dang good. I didn’t sample the Verlasso Sustainable Salmon Peruvian Poke with Cucumber-lime Salad and Aji Verde Salsa ($7.50) but the group seemed to enjoy it, although maybe not as much as they had hoped to.
The Korean BBQ Beef Short Rib Tacos ($7.50) at the LAstyle booth (in Hollywood Land) were actually pretty great with delicious, tender marinated short rib and tangy-spicy kimchi, but this is definitely one of those dishes that seems pretty ordinary for So Cal. I guess that’s fitting coming from the LAstyle booth — and actually, I’d still recommend these, especially if you’re visiting from somewhere that KBBQ tacos aren’t easily accessible.
The Festival Marketplace booths all have some nice signage with information and fun facts on the food or ingredient being showcased in the booth.
Over at Cluck-A-Doodle-Moo, the Grilled Harris Ranch Beef Tenderloin Slider with Chimichurri Sauce ($8) was really delicious. The beef on our slider was well-seasoned and perfectly cooked. The chimichurri was less memorable than the beef but the pickled onions were the perfect touch to bring it all together. Unfortunately, the Salt & Beer Vinegar Parmesan Chicken Wings ($7.50) at this booth were a disappointment. Our impression was that the Festival Marketplaces have a hard time keeping fried foods crispy… the wings here felt like they had been sitting for a while. On top of being a bit soggy, they just lacked flavor. Bummer. Skip this one.
From Avocado Time, the Avocado & Pepper Jack Petite Guacamole Burger ($7.75) was a big hit. Super flavorful, perfectly toasted brioche bun, and delicious guac — but, at the end of the day, it’s a mini cheeseburger with guacamole. This is a delicious cheeseburger, for sure, but not really unique at all. If unique doesn’t make a difference to you, then go for it – it’s good. If you are looking for unique, then go for the Spiced Oumph! on Pita with Avocado Hummus and Garlic Sauce ($6). But I’d warn against mistaking unique for delicious with this one. I wasn’t a fan of the Oumph! — it was pretty convincing as far as fake meat goes but if there’s an uncanny valley for fake meat, then Oumph! resides in it. It feels and tastes pretty real but it’s still just weird enough to not work. Joey from MouseInfo loved the dish though, so maybe you will too.
Over at Garlic Kissed, one of our favorites was the Black Garlic Soy-braised Pork Belly Bahn Mi ($7.50). It’s really hard to go wrong with pork belly, add in black garlic soy and you’d have to actively be trying to mess this one up. Luckily, they nailed it and this one was so good that I didn’t want to give Joey his half of the sandwich. Of course, living in Orange County, great bahn mi sandwiches are abundant, so it was tough paying over $7 for a mini bahn mi when I can go over to Lee’s and get a pretty good bahn mi that’s 3x the size for about $5. Oh well, the pork belly here is definitely better than what Lee’s serves up so I’d argue it’s worth it.
Next to Garlic Kissed, the Off The Cobb booth has a couple of pretty unique items. First up, the Sweet Corn Nuggets with Beef Chili ($6.75) wasn’t really on our radar until we saw a couple of other folks digging into it. Crispy sweet corn nuggets covered in chili sounds great but the problem here was that the beef chili wasn’t anything special and the corn nuggets weren’t crispy. This could be a great little snack if the corn nuggets were hot and crispy and I could see this being a popular addition to the menu at somewhere like Disneyland’s Stage Door Cafe or being the filling for one of the cones over in Cars Land. The only dessert item we’ve tried so far this year was the Caramel Popcorn Crispy Treat ($4), which we bought for the novelty alone. It turned out to be surprisingly good in a weird way. Caramel corn mixed into a rice crispy treat with dried salty corn pieces, formed into a ball, put on a stick and dipped in chocolate. It’s salty, sweet, chewy, crispy — and I’d say it’s worth trying for its weirdness alone.
Of course, this year’s Food and Wine Festival is set against the backdrop of major construction now underway on what will soon be the re-themed Pixar Pier.
Lots of scaffolding up along the pier as Disney works to change the California-themed seaside pier into a pier themed to various Pixar movies and neighborhoods. Mickey’s smiling face will remain on the ferris wheel.
The Festival Beer Garden has taken over the Paradise Garden dining area. If you’re looking for even more beer selection than what the Marketplace booths offer, then head over here.
A nice selection of beers on tap along with lots of space to enjoy your drinks. The nearby Paradise Garden Grill restaurant has a special menu during the festival and signage throughout the beer garden area gives fun facts on California beers and breweries.
Of course, there’s plenty of merchandise available.
So is the 2018 Disney California Adventure Food and Wine Festival worth checking out? I’d say it is, especially for Annual Passholders who snag a Sip and Savor Pass. When the festival returned after a five-year hiatus in 2016 and Sip and Savor Passes debuted they were a terrible value but the pass has been reworked over the last couple years and now it’s a pretty good option if you’re looking to try some of the festival offerings without breaking the bank. At the end our afternoon sampling the festival, we felt that the festival offerings were good but not great, especially when you stacked them up against the Festival of the Holidays offerings, which just wrapped up a couple months ago… your mileage may vary of course, but the holiday offerings seemed more inventive and exciting to us — perhaps the constraints of the California theme of the Food and Wine Festival is more limiting than the holiday theme, which Disney did a great job of opening up and being creative with. In any case, we’ve got a long way to go before Festival of the Holidays returns later this year, so until then, Disney California Adventure Food and Wine Festival is worth checking out if you’re looking for a foodie adventure in your Disney theme park.
