Some dining reviews...or which turkey sandwich is best?

[luvpooh]

Just got back yesterday from 7 wonderful nights. We really didn't eat a lot of sit down dinners, but did a lot of grazing. Sorry, no pictures, I either forgot or was told that I was nuts (imagine that!) You will see that turkey sandwiches are a favorite food for one of the members of our party!
The cast:
me: age 30 - dying for this trip
my fiance: age 29 - dying for the trip but stressed about leaving work

Day 1:

Ah, the first turkey sandwich of the trip. The little football sandwich that Continental gives you on their mid-day 'snack' flights. Along with this came a bag of Fritos (lovely aroma in a contained setting, wait, they play a role later) and a mini Milky Way bar. How can you not love food on a 2 hour flight? Take that Terra Blue chips!

We arrived at BWV after picking up some essentials at Albertson's. Those included beer, lemons/limes, bananas, water, soda, chips, English muffins, pop tarts, spray butter, liquid hand soap (best $2 ever spent on a trip, I skeeve bar soap!), shampoo, body wash, toothpaste, hand sanitizer and an impulse buy of sunflower seeds at the checkout counter, which I just opened earlier today. Incredibly, almost everything got used except for 2 sodas, the aforementioned sunflower seeds, a pkg of pop tarts that came home with us, and goodly portions of all of the toiletries, and the spray butter. What exactly is spray butter anyway?

After checking in and resting a lot longer than anticipated, we headed down to Downtown Disney on one of the 1st of many bus trips from hell. After finally arriving, our first stop was Fulton's. I know we're in the minority, but we love Fulton's. We zigged and zagged thru the lengthy line coming out of the door and found 2 empty bar seats - score!
Ah, Fulton's Mai Tai's - nectar of the gods. We started with 2 of these, yummy! And the floater of 151 really helps you unwind after a long travel day! It also helps with the hoards of conventioneers whipping out their Corporate Amex's and buying 12 drinks at a time, and acting accordingly, BTW...goodness me, I've got to get to a convention so I can act like a ******* without remorse! But I digress. We also ordered the fried calamari, (with marinara sauce and tartar sauce on the side) which is sooooo yummy, unlike any other I've ever had (we don't think it's really calamari, the texture is too nice for it to be, LOL). I also ordered 2 Malpeque oysters, which could be the largest and tastiest oysters I've ever had. We ordered another round of drinks and chilled for awhile, talking about our upcoming plans. We settled up and moved on.

Well, the next stop was pointless, and I'm $25 poorer for it. We stopped in the Portobello Yacht Club and took 2 seats at the bar. I had been hyping up to DFi about the beef short ribs bruschetta that Kevin raved about on the Disney Podcast a few weeks ago. So we were all set to order a couple of drinks and share this appetizer. We sat down at the bar, and the bartender was either trying to be a funny guy, or he was just a jerk. I can't explain the way he was acting, but just jerky if that makes sense, like he was nasty joking around with everyone, but I couldn't tell if he was really joking? Anyway, we got a drink menu and asked for a regular menu. After ordering 2 drinks (gin and tonic for him, glass of Sauvignon Blanc for me), we finallly got a menu. Took a quick look through it and decided that the only appealing app at the time was the bruschetta. So imagine our surprise when the bartender told us they were out of it 'for the night'. Well, that was a disappointment! We took a look at the menu again and couldn't find anything else, what can I say, our hearts were set on it.
As an aside, while we were perusing the menu, there was a family to our left that was standing in an area that didn't have stools, but did not clearly look like a service area. The bartender kept ignoring them and then asked them 'do you need anything'? Well, imagine how his attitude changed when they ordered a bottle of rather expensive red wine! I'm surprised he didn't throw us out of our seats to give to them! Some other observations while we were there - a female bartender flew by us (behind the bar) while opening a bottle of Guiness and gave us a bath. When our bartender saw our faces and asked what was wrong, when we told him he said something snide and laughed at us. I wish I remember what he said, it was oh so very pleasant...he was also making fun of this other guy who was ordering drinks, and giving him an overall hard time b/c the guy had a drink in his hand, and he put it down on the bar to pay, and immediately the bartender picked it up and went to throw it out, and the guy was like, no, I'm not done!
So to make a long story short, we ordered 2 overpriced drinks, Fi didn't even drink his whole drink (said it tasted like sawdust?), and left without the famed short rib bruschetta. PLEASE remember, this is Wednesday, no short rib bruschetta (foreshadowing alert!).
Next stop was Raglan Road. We have never had a full dinner here in the past, and still have not! We have eaten at the bar 2 times in the past with bad results. Well, this was going to be their 3rd strike, but we have a winner! We took 2 seats at the busy bigger bar (the musicians were playing) and ordered 2 pints, Boddingtons for me and I can't remember what he had. We looked thru the menu, and I was still pushing for the Dalkey Duo (the sausages) but lost - we ordered the Drunk chicken. It came out seriously 3 minutes later. Well, despite it's quick appearance, it was delish! It was 3 chicken tenders (grilled) on skewers, with a dipping sauce that was like a lime aioli sauce, on a bed of greens that were simply dressed with what seemed to be honey, salt and pepper. It was really simple but really good.

By this time, it was getting late, we were tired, and the music was loud. We just wanted to sit somewhere. So from here, we got back on the bus to the Boardwalk and stopped in at the ESPN Club. It was pretty empty b/c there wasn't any major sporting events on. I think we ordered 2 beers, and we had the nachos. Some of them were really good, but some of them were just tortilla chips, and there was really no beef to be found. I found these to be 'okay' where in the past they used to be great. Ever since they changed the menu last year at ESPN, the food has really gone downhill - it's depressing, we used to love going in there, ordering some bar food and watching a game. Not that it stopped us from still going there, but it's just not the same...

Ok, this is long so I will start Thursday in a new thread.

 

[luvpooh]

Day 2 - Thursday

We slept in and had breakfast in the room. Around 1 we took the boat over(which was waiting for us!) to the Yacht Club to have lunch at the Yacht Club Galley. We had made an ADR that morning, so we were seated immediately. I ordered an iced tea and the tomato and mozzarella sandwich, which came with greens and basil oil on it. It came with a dish of vegetable orzo salad, which was really delicious. It had bits of tomato, eggplant, squash, onion mixed with orzo in a very light vinaigrette. DFi had his 2nd turkey sandwich of the trip, the Yacht Club sandwich, which has turkey, ham, bacon, cheddar, lettuce tomato and mayo on whole wheat bread. It came with homemade kettle chips, which were tasty. He only ate 1/2 of the sandwich and took the other 1/2 back to the room, where we went following lunch, on the same boat we went to the YC on (on it's return trip from MGM going to Epcot!). Overall, great lunch, we always enjoy YC Galley for a quiet sit down lunch.

We had a 5:30 PM reservation for Liberty Tree Tavern. Around the time when we were supposed to leave the room, we both looked at each other and were like, are you going to be hungry in an hour? The answer was 'no'. So, I canceled the LTT reservation, and we decided we'd wing it for dinner, which was slightly alarming to me, LOL.
We got to the MNSSHP around 7 and swam up Main St. It was crowded, but the crowds thinned out as we got into Fantasyland. We did all the rides we wanted and watched the parade when we started to feel 'peckish'. I decided to try to walk up to LTT (it was about 8:50) but they said they were full. Thank you to the woman who rushed up to the podium with your family and decided it was more important for you to check in than for me to ask my question, even though I had waited MY turn...the elbow you threw was really classy, thanks hon.
Anyway...I threw out a couple of ideas, including taking our chances at a monorail restaurant, but DFi had gotten into that cranky, I have to eat 'now' moods (anyone else with a SO like that?). So I said that Cosmic Ray's serves chicken and ribs, would he want that? Yes. Ok, if that 'station' is closed, are you ok with something else? Yes. Okay, upward and onward.
We get to Cosmic Ray's and it's a mob scene, naturally. They were having the dance party with Stitch. I sent DFi to get a table, and then got in line to get us burgers (as the ribs and chicken were nowhere to be found). He should have listened to me and gotten chicken sandwiches instead of the burgers...I was in line for 1/2 hr. It didn't help that someone cut me in line. Initially I thought she was helping the guy that was in line in front of me, since they knew each other, but she placed her order for her share of the small country the 2 of them were feeding. As time wore on, I finally got to order, and then eventually got my food. I took my tray with 2 cheeseburger meals and a large sprite over to the 'good' fixings bar, and started loading up on the ketchup, mayo, honey mustard, salt, pepper, onions, tomato and mushrooms. You could imagine how long this took, especially thanks to the little boy that decided that he was on a mission from God to fill as many of the little paper cups as possible with almost all of the sauteed mushrooms. Yay...can you tell how fed up I was at this point? We should have just force fed ourselves turkey and stuffing 4 hours beforehand to avoid this chaos. As I am walking back to the area where DFi had gotten a table, he is walking towards me. He got worried that I was gone for so long and wasn't answering my phone (hello, see this tray?) and came to find me. He was visibly upset that something had happened to me. I kind of lost it when we sat down and had a little cry...meltdown much? After that, we dug into the food, which was adequate; the mushrooms I was able to scrape together were yummy. And the french fries (to me, I haven't had my 'own' fries since June) tasted heavenly. We sat for a few minutes because of course now Cosmic Ray's was empty (this seemed to be a trend this trip, we were moving with the crowds the whole time) and then wrapped up MNSSHP and went 'home'.

Day 3 will bring another turkey sandwich and round 1 of the Food and Wine Fest booths!

 

[luvpooh]

Day 3 - Friday (part 1)

We were off to the Animal Kingdom this morning. We hiked to Expedition Everest and got a fastpass. Then we took the 'back way' to Dinoland, and stopped to have poptarts in front of the Nemo theater on some benches overlooking the water. It was actually quite peaceful.
We wrapped up AK rather early, and decided that we would head over to the Grand Floridian b/c I wanted to check out their wedding merchandise (I really wanted a cake cutter/server set) and then we'd either eat at the GF Cafe or start heading over to Olivia's for lunch (at OKW). Well, I struck out on the wedding stuff, looks like they're phasing it out and DFi said nothing appealed to him on the GF Cafe menu (boo, there was a good looking tuna nicoise salad I had my eye on!). He also decided, again, that he had to eat 'now' and didn't want to schlep over to Olivia's for lunch (fine with me, wasn't my idea LOL!). So I called Disney Dining to see if we could get an ADR at the Plaza Restaurant, which was a no-go. So I went to the next stop on the monorail, Concourse Steakhouse. No problem, got a reservation for about 1/2 hour from then. So we got on the monorail and headed over.
Is it just me or does the concourse of the Contemporary scream '80's vacation' to you? It just seems like a cool resort hotel that my parents would have taken us to when we were kids. Anyway, we checked in and were seated immediately, in a very cozy semicircle booth, quietly out of the way. I ordered an iced tea and the Steakhouse Beef Tenderloin Salad with Bibb lettuce, goat cheese, tomatoes and vinaigrette on a grilled tortilla. This appeared small at first, like there wasn't a lot of salad on the plate (but a ton of meat), but it was a good size. It was really tasty, I could eat it again right now! The tortilla on the bottom was grilled and charred and so yummy! DFi got, what else, a turkey club. He ate the whole thing so I guess he liked it but I think when it came to rate them all, this didn't rate as high as others. It was on some really big slices of multigrain bread, and looked good. It came with chips, which also appeared to be homemade kettle chips like at YC Galley, but didn't taste the same. When we were finishing our meal, a manager came over to our table and chatted with us about where we were staying, the F&W Fest and our park visits. She was just the sweetest thing and I wish I could remember her name. I do remember she was from Kansas though.
That night we went to the F&W Fest. I'm going to post separately with our reviews.

 

[Minniespal]

Excellent reviews, looking forward to reading the F&W one.