Gluten-free intro and Columbia Harbor House
The background information: Way back in the beginning of July, we decided to do a trial of gluten-free eating...for a few reasons. The primary one was that Dave has psoriasis and has tried approximately 387 different things for it with little to no luck. Cutting out gluten seemed like a relatively easy one to try, so we figured we should at least cross it off the list. He had a celiac panel done before we started, and it came back completely negative, but it still seemed worth a try. The thing about psoriasis is that everyone has something completely different as the thing that worked for them, so it's really hard to find
that thing for yourself.
Toss in some behavioral issues and Gus' asthma and allergies, and it seemed like it couldn't hurt for the whole family to give it a try. I was already doing a low carb thing and was 99% gluten-free by default, so it seemed less daunting to me than it might have otherwise.
I thought that by starting in July, we'd have PLENTY of time to get the whole thing figured out before the Disney trip. We'd do a one month trial and see what happened.
Only...figuring the whole thing out has proved more complicated than I expected it to be. Within a few days of going off gluten, things seemed a lot....calmer around our house. Fewer tantrums, less yelling, more reasonable children. Dave's psoriasis, on the other hand, didn't seem to be improving at all. When we've experimented with letting the kids have gluten, Gus usually reacts physically almost immediately, with a bad headache and/or stomachache, and we notice really unpleasant behavioral changes with all of the kids over the next day or two. It's happened often enough now that I'm reasonably sure it's not all in my head.
So...what to do? On one hand, I didn't want to be the person with no diagnosis who won't eat gluten because it's all trendy and Oprah did it. On the other hand...I think there might be some good reasons why it's trendy to not eat gluten, and the overstimulation of a Disney trip can provoke enough meltdowns on its own without adding in First Time Eating Gluten in a Month meltdowns.
That's where we are. I don't think anyone in the family has celiac (I do have an order for labs for Gus, since he has definite physical reactions, but my understanding is that in order for it to be accurate he'd first have to go back to eating gluten for several weeks...and, you know, that makes him feel bad). But I do think it's not good for my kids and negatively affects their behavior. And I also think it's worth giving it a longer trial for Dave's psoriasis. And if all of them are going to be gluten-free, I'd kind of feel like a jerk sitting there eating yummy bread all by myself.
So that was that. I added a notation to all of our dining reservations that we couldn't have gluten, and I spent a whole lot of time reading dining reviews of gluten-free experiences at Disney.
Ari, incidentally, was not happy about any of this, as you'll see later on. Pretty much the only thing he DID have meltdowns about on the trip was not being able to eat gluten. Ironically. In fact, I bet just reading this part of my trip report is going to make him grumpy (hi, Ari!)
I've never done detailed dining reviews before, but I decided to try to do them this year since I found other people's gluten-free reviews so helpful when making my plans.
Keep in mind that we probably weren't as cautious as most people with celiac would be about things like cross contamination (and, as you'll see, there was at least one time when we screwed up completely). For example, sometimes at quick service places when I knew from my research that something on the regular menu was gluten-free, we just ordered that without doing the whole talking to a manager thing. But for the most part we did talk to chefs and managers and made sure everything was safe.
Phew! That's a lot of introduction there. On to the actual food!
Columbia Harbor House
We got here around 2:00, and there were still surprisingly long lines. I'd read enough beforehand that I knew the basic drill, so we asked the first CM we saw about a gluten-free menu. She told us to go ahead and get in line, and when we got to the cashier, he or she would get the manager for us. So Dave got in line while I took the kids upstairs to find seats.
Kids were pretty hungry and therefore pretty grumpy at this point. And pretty much any time we go out to eat or go grocery shopping Ari gets a little grumpy because it makes him think about not eating gluten. I distributed ipods and we settled in for the wait. And a long wait it was.
I knew to expect this, but I was kind of dreading it, mostly because of the kids. Thank goodness for ipods. The way it usually works at quick service places, with any kind of food allergy, is that you wait in the regular line then tell the cashier about your food allergy. The cashier then calls the manager, and you can't order until you talk to the manager, even if you know exactly what you want (which we always did, owing to my obsessive research and the gluten-free Disney app I bought for my iphone). And then they have to make your food for you, so that takes extra time, too. What it boiled down to was that we usually got our food faster at table service places than at quick service places on this trip.
Dave turned up 30 minutes later...with one meal still missing. He looked kind of miffed. I told you it was going to take longer, I said. You told me it would take longer; you didn't tell me they wouldn't be able to count to five, he responded. He'd ordered 5 meals, but somehow they'd forgotten to make one of them. The kids had food at least, though, so they started eating while we waited on the last meal.
A note about my food pictures: they are not the best, because I'm incredibly self-conscious about taking pictures of food. So I kind of did it really quick and didn't focus so much on quality. Maybe next time I'll be braver. But I did remember to take pictures of most things, so you can at least get an idea.
Columbia Harbor House is, as far as we can tell, the only place (or at least the only quick service) in the Magic Kingdom that serves allergen-free chicken tenders. Ari, you have to understand, LOVES chicken tenders. Back before the grand gluten-free experiment began, he actually contemplated starting a blog specifically to review chicken tenders from different restaurants. So I was beyond thrilled to learn that we could get gluten free chicken tenders at Disney World.
We all ordered them:
2 of these were kids plates, and 3 were adults, but I think they gave us all 4 chicken tenders and similar looking amounts of fries. It was a ton of food. The chicken tenders are really good! Much better than the chicken nuggets they serve to people without food allergies. I hope the secret doesn't get out! Although maybe if it does, Disney will have to bring back the real chicken tenders they used to have. The kids all loved them too, and we breathed a sigh of relief. We didn't really have a plan B if they weren't going to be able to order chicken fingers 50 times during the trip. My understanding is that the fries themselves are gluten free everywhere, but there are issues with cross contamination in a lot of places because of the shared fryers. I asked on the boards about this before the trip and was told that we should be able to order fries anywhere they serve the chicken tenders, since they already have to have a dedicated fryer, and we found this to be the case, in our experience. Some places we were also given baked fries.
I believe Columbia Harbor House offered either French Meadow brownies or cookies for dessert. We'd bought some of the brownies at home before the trip so we'd know whether the kids liked them or not. They love them. The ones we can buy at the grocery store are tiny compared to the ones they give you at Disney. These suckers were HUGE, and we got five of them with a lot of our meals, so I was pretty thoroughly sick of them by the time we left. Not the kids, though. We all got brownies with this meal. The French Meadow brownies are pretty good....the texture is goodmore fudgy than cakeythey're on the VERY sweet side for my tastes...I prefer a more dark chocolately taste. But I don't really need to be eating a brownie with every meal anyway, so it's just as well I didn't love them.
Alrightythere's my very long first dining review. The others won't require quite so much exposition!
Someone should get to work on that!
