Restaurants OOP

[karpy111]

We usually do the meal plan and eat at places like Ohana, Tusker House, Be our Guest, Mama Melrose, Boma. I think eating at nice restaurants are still a big part of making the trip magical. We are considering paying OOP this trip. So my question is do you eat at Disney restaurants like these paying OOP?
If so which places do you find are a decent value for a family of 4.
Thanks

 

[Pumbaa_]

We eat where we want and just pay accordingly l you don’t save much doing a dining plan, you just avoid sticker shock

 

[DISNEY1975]

My daughter had a home(vacation)work assignment once from her math teacher to compare the DP price to our actual cost. We lost by a little on the DP. I do continue to get it though only to avoid the "sticker shock" mentioned above! I think many people pay OOP vs DP. I dont believe there is a "best value" at any TS, but in theory, I would say a buffet if you can manage to eat $50 worth of food!!

 

[Disneylover99]

We tend to avoid buffets or price fixed meals OOP.

 

[chris benton]

We also just eat wherever we want, whenever we want. If we want to eat at places where the ddp made more financial sense, we'd buy the plan, or if free dining was offered, and paying rack rate for a room made financial sense to get free dining, we'd pay for it.

Do the math for your family to make your decision. It's pretty cut and dried if you should get the plan or not. Factor in your own convenience factor, as well. IMO, swiping a credit card is just as convenient as scanning a magic band. I will pay up for convenience of other things in life, so I understand the convenience factor and not wanting to think about meal prices - I totally get it. I just don't agree with it for WDW food, but I do the same thing in other situations.

Paying OOP, I think decent bargains for the quality are:
Flame Tree Spare Rib Platter - easily splittable for two people, imo.
Kimonos for Sushi
Hot Subs at Fuel - VERY high quality. I was extremely surprised.
Teppan Edo (food is just ok, chefs' "shows" can be great - all in all, worth the price, imo)
Hoop De Doo (isn't HDDR actually cheaper, OOP?)
Trail's End
If you hapen to be near Swan/Dolphin around a meal time, consider those options. They are routinely mentioned in the "Best Restaurant" threads. I find them to be better priced, and better quality - probably since they are not Disney owned.

My deal, in a nutshell is this:
The food at WDW, in general, is overpriced, and haphazard in quality, although, for the amount of ppl they are feeding, they do a very nice job compared to other theme parks, for SURE. I live in a big food town, so WDW food is not a major focal point of our vacation when in Orlando. I definitely do my research on where to eat, but I'm mostly looking for stuff that is decent without being too overpriced, and factoring in that walking around in the heat and going on rides, stuffing ourselves isn't optimal.

Do the math, if you are still doing multiple character meals, or if your family dines the way the meal plan is set up, the DP might make more sense for you to save money.

 

[sharonabe]

If we want to do a character meal, we choose one and do it for breakfast.

At a la carte places, we choose what we WANT to eat. Many times, I'll have just an app as those almost always look better to me than entrees. We share one dessert, if we get one at all. Our biggest savings comes in what we drink. We prefer water with our meals, so that saves a ton. We save sodas and specialty drinks for a refreshing snack.

Just about any place can be a good value, but some of the tried and true are Via Napoli, 50s Prime Time, Sci-Fi, Liberty Tree Tavern (lunch), and The Plaza.

 

[lotsohugginbear]

Have your TS meal in the morning. The Wave , Grand Floridian Cafe and Trail's End are reasonable. Book a 10:45 Tusker House to save money and to be there when they change over to the lunch items. Get a Disney Gift Card account and add a bit every week before your trip. Paying with gift cards is similar to dining plan in that you are essentially paying for food and souvenirs ahead of time. I also bring Starbucks and Landry's gift cards. Get a Landrys card for $25.00 and put your birthday reward during the month of your trip. Landrys owns Yak n Yeti, Trex and Rainforest Cafe. Check out the budget board and tips board on the forums. I have learned a lot on those boards around saving money.

 

[CT Yankee]

The dining plan probably does not save you money. I actually did price it out one year and compared it to items that we would get off the menus, plus the cost of the snacks that come with the DDP. The cost came out to the same exact dollar amount. I am sure there is a whole department full of actuaries at Disney who go through these same calculations. I still get the dining plan because I like the idea of having everything paid ahead of time, and I don't get the sticker shock as others have mentioned.

Slightly off topic, but we are doing things a bit differently this year with the dining plan. We are spacing out our table service credits so that we can double them up and use them for signature dining. The "off" nights we are using a combination of counter service meals and paying OOP for one meal to cover our dinners. We arrive pretty late our first night there, so we won't be using any of our dining plan credits that day. We might use up a couple of snack credits that day but not any counter or table service credits. If this works out for us this time, we may use this for future trips. We found that the quality of the table service meals was declining and that we were wasting a lot of time each night to sit down for a full meal.

 

[toasterstrudel]

We always pay out of pocket. We just don't eat the way it is designed to get any value from it. We go in the summer and it is HOT. We all NEED to drink water to stay hydrated. My DH may order a soda, but usually we all drink water. We do eat 1 TS a day, and 1 CS, but my 16 year old DD usually wants a kids meal at CS places. We don't always do dessert and we don't do 2 snacks per day (we would if we were hungry, but we just usually aren't!) We do snacks here and there (dole whip, yes please!) but not several a day, every day. We aren't big breakfast eaters (bars, nuts, fruit in the room is plenty) so we wouldn't even want to use the snack credits there.

We eat where we want and just scan our magic band. It gets charged to our card and we don't worry about it. Our next trip we have reservations at: Liberty Tree Tavern, Sci Fi, BOG, Skippers Canteen, Rainforest Cafe, Paddlefish, and the Plaza.

 

[BOST99]

We also did the calc and did save some money. In your list we did boma, bog and tusker house and did have a bit of sticker shock (even looking at menus ahead of time) since it had been 2 years and prices felt a lot higher.

We did buy disney gr at target prior to our trip so that helped feeling like we were pop as we already prepaid for food.

 

[rwdavis2]

Another out of pocket person here. Since the plan is not designed to save you money we don't have any reason to get it. We got it heavily discounted once and didn't see the point in paying full price for it.

 

[goodeats]

We paid OOP last trip and we would have had to change our habits to make the dining plan work for us. We like salads or appetizers (sometimes instead of a large entrée) and we certainly don't usually get one dessert per person. I guess if we only ate at buffets we could have made it work, but it would have been forced.

DH had price shock, and he probably would have had a more magical experience if things were sort of free. I mean we still would have had to tip and we probably would have ordered things not on the plan.

 

[shocker]

We are done with DDP. But, I do get TiW now with my AP.

My fav places to go OOP are:

Plaza Inn
Nomad Lounge
Flametree BBQ-QS but so shareable
ESPN
Mama Melrose (for flatbread pizza)
Marrakesh (for sampler appetizer used as dinner, plus dance entertainment)
Beaches & Cream (for shared meals & a kitchen sink to feed everyone)
Via Napoli
Trail's End


Still on my list to try:
Big River Brewing
Geyser Point

 

[shocker]

Paying with gift cards is similar to dining plan in that you are essentially paying for food and souvenirs ahead of time.

There's way more benefit to using GC than just pre-paying. I want to make sure you're not missing the boat, so to speak. You mentioned reading the budget boards, so I hope you have a fuller understanding of the GC than what you've stated here. If not, please ask.

 

[maranara]

We did the math when we got home from our most recent trip (because I'm THAT kind of nerd...) and we came out ahead paying OOP. Pretty significantly, actually. That included TWO meals at Boma and TWO character meals. We didn't pay any attention to what we were ordering - just got what we wanted. I liked not worrying about whether we were getting a good value. Some days we were hungrier then others. And some days we ate one TS meal and a bunch of snacks.

 

[glocon]

We’ve always picked a room only discount over the dp. We too just get gift cards to pay for our meals. Still pre-paid, don’t worry about the price of food, don’t worry about money. We get the gc to pay for the resort too. At kroger you get 4x fuel points, so when you get, say, $1000 in gift cards, you get 4000 fuel points which add up to 4$ off per gallon of gas up to 35 gallons. So twice we take off $2 per gallon (we bring two cars to fill up) and have quite a bit of savings as well as pre-paid meals. Definitely come out ahead that way!

 

[Donald - my hero]

There's way more benefit to using GC than just pre-paying. I want to make sure you're not missing the boat, so to speak. You mentioned reading the budget boards, so I hope you have a fuller understanding of the GC than what you've stated here. If not, please ask.

Ok I'll bite, talk about gift cards! We've only just decided to go this route. Take into account I'm a Canuck so not eligible for the buying cards at a discount thru any stores.

 

[MudQueen22]

We did the math after our first family trip and discovered that we had overpaid by purchasing the dining plan, and that was for a trip where we had a lot of character dining--almost one a day. We calculated what we would have spent had we paid for everything we got on the DDP, and we overpaid by about $300 for our family. In addition, we would not have actually ordered all that we were entitled to on the ddp had we paid oop for that trip, so we could have saved there also.

We have done better paying OOP, even with character meals, because we save so much on the meals that aren't prix fixe. On QS and snacks, we find that we often share, or I will order an appetizer or a kid meal.

 

[kaytieeldr]

My daughter had a home(vacation)work assignment once from her math teacher to compare the DP price to our actual cost. We lost by a little on the DP.

Was that with or without the alcohol included?

 

[DISNEY1975]

Was that with or without the alcohol included?

Without, though it was with buying (using snack credits) about 40 snacks (Rice Krispy treats, Minnie Cookies, Chip & Dale snacks etc...) to bring home as souvenirs for her friends.