Turfs Up: Too Much Food for Happy Feet - Sept DxDP Lots of Pics *Update: Post 129*

[MyTalula]

I made a lunch ADR at GFC for my December trip just because of y'all!

I'm going to be making a GFC ressie for our upcoming February stay because of this thread too! YUMMMY

 

[Golf4food]

We had a relatively late lunch ADR on this, our last day in Disney World (sniffle). So, we opted for a late morning snack of churros. These are one of those "must have" snacks for us, and we hadn't managed to snag any yet, so we sought to satisfy our craving with these:

It was ok, but not as good as some churros we've had in the past. And not nearly as good as the churros at Tijuana Flats (shameless plug), which are to churros what Jiko is to Disney Dining.

I give them 2.5 penguins:

I agree with Golf4food. These were ok, but not great. I remember really enjoying the churros we had on our last trip to Disney, and these just did not live up to my memories. They were kind of bland and needed more sugar. I also agree on the Tijuana Flats churros. However, in fairness, those churros are fresh and hot and have honey drizzled on them, too. Kind of hard for snack cart churros to live up to.

Maybe we just got spoiled on churros in between trips. I think we'll have to have them again next time we're at Disney just to make sure. You know...purely for research...for our DIS friends...

I give these churros two penguins:

Up next, lunch at the Plaza. Was it everything we hoped it would be, or a total disaster?? Stay tuned to find out!






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[LoraJ]

So we had Ron at Jiko as well. He was great!

 

[gellybean]

@ "Lick it!"



Great reviews... stayed up way too late reading the whole thing from start to finish.

We loved, loved, loved Jiko and Tutto Italia on our last trip. Based on your review, I'm definitely going to have to try the Cannelloni al Forno on our next trip!

Jiko... was our favorite meal of the trip hands down. I got the Filet which was fabulous but hubby's Short Ribs blew the filet out of the water, if a beef filet can be blown out of the water....

I will be ordering those babies next time! So good!

 

[Golf4food]

Our ADR was for 1:15, but we were good DISer's and showed up at about 1:00 (we were also really hungry!). We checked in at the host stand, got the magical little buzzer thing, and proceeded to wait. And wait. And wait. Finally, after about an hour of waiting (so, it's now just before 2:00!), our names were called and there was much rejoicing in the land.

We were led into the Plaza and seated at a 5 top table. We were a little confused by this, since there were several other open tables that were smaller and there were still only 2 of us, but we were way too starving by this point to ask many questions.

It took quite a while, but our waitress finally appeared and took our orders. She brought our drinks out to us and then disappeared for a really long time. We were concerned (and still really hungry) and about 5 minutes from hiring a Sherpa to track her down (which would have been hard, since we were miles from the Animal Kingdom), when she finally brought out our food:

I ordered the Cheesesteak with no mushrooms, onions, or peppers - pretty much just meat and cheese:

The meat was dry, but had a decent enough flavor. The sandwich needed at least twice as much cheese. This one was more like a Che-steak. The roll was good, though - tasty, soft, and warm. It was the best part of the entree. The fries were ok, too.

I also ordered the Cheesesteak. I'm less veggie-phobic than Golf4food, so I only had them hold the mushrooms (no fungus for me!)

I also thought the meat was way too dry. The roll was soft and the sandwich was hot, but I was still disappointed overall. The fries were crispy, but were already kind of cold when they hit the table. I was way too starving to send anything back, though - it took long enough to get it the first time.

For dessert, I ordered the Original Banana Split:

Banana, strawberry, pineapple, vanilla bean, cocoa bean - this is more a serving of fruits & veggies than dessert! Good, large, and tasty. They lose points for not getting off all of the banana stringies, which is a no-no on my banana boat.

I ordered the Brownie Sundae:

This consisted of a HUGE brownie, vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, whipped cream, and a cherry (which, of course, went immediately to Golf4food). The brownie was rich and chewy and quite good. The ice cream also tasted good. The whipped cream was really runny and melty (if you look back at the picture, you can see how flat it fell - the cherry sunk all the way down through the whipped cream). For the record, the brownie was not warm at all, so it was not to blame for the whipped cream melting. The whole dish tasted good, though.



We finished with the huge desserts (we both stuck to eating about 1/2, but were still pretty full) and gave the waitress our card to pay and she disappeared again for another long while. (Really - there's never a good Sherpa around when you need one!) We were beyond ready to leave when she finally came back out with our card and a cupcake and announced to the entire room that it was Golf4food's birthday.

We both thought the cupcake itself was just ok, but the gesture was nice.

I give the Plaza 2 Penguins:

I give the Plaza 1.5 Penguins:

I think I was more disappointed in this meal than Golf4food was. This was our last TS meal, it was his actual birthday, and we had read lots of reviews of how great this place is - so, I wanted it to be really special for him. When our actual experience proved to be pretty lacking, it really bummed me out. I think this place suffered from what we've dubbed "Flame Tree Syndrome." On our last trip, we went to Flame Tree because of all the wonders we had read about it here, and our experience just did not live up to the hype at all. So, we were that much more disappointed than we would have been because of the high expectations.

Earlier, in our Jiko review, I mentioned that I now use "I miss Ron" as a code to DH that I think we're getting cruddy service - that new tradition started here, as an FYI. The meal was about 30 minutes longer than it otherwise would have been, since we were sadly lacking in the Sherpa department.

Neither one of us considered tracking down a manager - it wasn't a totally horrid experience - we didn't find bugs in our sandwiches or anything. It was just a let down after the other great meals we'd had and our own (admittedly too high) expectations. We'll probably try the Plaza again. We just won't be using a TS credit, and we have several other places we want to try first.






Up next... After our somewhat scary lunch, we opt for dinner near a Haunted Mansion. Will it be more frightening? Could it be? You'll have to stay tuned, because we don't want to inform you prematurely...







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[Jeanieblue114]

Your plaza experience was similar to our GF Cafe and Kona experiences.

I really wanted to like the GF Cafe because we used to go there a lot when I was a kid. It was dirty (a child threw chewed on melon and later ice next to our table and it stayed there for the entire TWO HOURS of dinner, 2 of our breadplates had food residue on them, the marshmallow for my fondue had a big hair on it, I asked for a doggie bag for our leftover rolls instead of throwing them out and they were packed in a USED disney gift shop bag loosely), hectic, loud, and very dissapointing.
I will never go there at dinner time again. I hope you have a better experience when you try dinner.

At kona, it was our ACTUAL anniversary. We just got a waitress that told us it was her anniversary the day before...that was it.
We waited 50 min. past our ADR and the dining time was a total of 45 min. It was so rushed it was something like out of a comedy movie where they rip the plate away as you have the fork in your mouth.
The food was cold and had obviously been under a heat lamp because she took our order, walked in one door and came out the other door with the food. There was a manager standing next to us with an electronic clipboard timing everything it seemed...irritating that she was hovering. But she was the manager so who do you complain to?
The DELICIOUS bread was taken off our table while my Dad still had his hand on it. The bill came after 2 bites of dessert.

If you want good service and actual FRESH food...I recommend Captain's Grille at the Yacht club (server Ryan) and the Wave (server Tim...AMAZING SERVER!)

 

[onelilspark]

Never, ever get a cheesesteak outside of Philly.

 

[Golf4food]

Never, ever get a cheesesteak outside of Philly.

Then we'd never get a cheesesteak. I've only been in Philly once for a 45 minute layover on a flight back from Pittsburg and at the time, even though I walked around the entire airport looking for one, there were NO CHEESESTEAKS to eat in the entire place! I had to eat a slice of pizza! Ben Franklin was rolling over in his grave, I hope! (The airport was under construction at the time - late 90s, maybe 97 or 98?) Still, you'd think Philly would have at least one place to get a Philly in their airport...

 

[Golf4food]

Or is it Harbour? U or no U? The sign sayeth the U stands.

Of course, the sign also implies you can enjoy a tall mug of something you can't buy inside the MK... so what does the sign know?

This sign knows what you can order and how much those things cost:

Even though Tazicket doesn't like stairs because of her bum knee (no, not a bum bum, the bum is fine, the knee is bad) she lets us sit upstairs at CHH because of the views of the park around the restaurant. I try to get us a view of the Haunted Mansion since it is Tazicket's favorite as compensation for her stair climbing.

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I had been looking forward to having one of these sandwiches for a year, since last September, because on our last trip in December they closed early for MVMCP and we got there five minutes too late (and had to eat at PVH). Needless to say I'd been looking forward to this sandwich for our entire trip.

It did not disappoint. The humus was great, the broccoli slaw was equally great, and the tomatoes complimented everything. If I was to go extremely nit-picky the bread could have been warm or freshly toasted. But it was good. My chocolate dessert thingy was yummy, too. But as we have already established I am an extreme chocoholic.

I would give this meal a solid 4 penguins.

CHH is my favorite counter service in the MK. Next time I might even try their tuna salad sandwich (I know... I know... I don't eat seafood, but sometimes I will eat canned tuna, which DH can't figure out).

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I went into CHH expecting to get my usual fish basket or maybe a fish & chicken basket but, lo, did the sign sayeth fried shrimp, and thus shrimps were fried and yea were fried shrimps comsumethed.

It is about fried freaking time that WDW got some fried shrimp on property. For years my great WDW dining lament has been the lack of fried seafood (cheap fish & chips barely count). I knew it was risky ordering fried shrimp a) so far inland, and b) at WDW, but I hadn't had shrimp in a while so I decided to take a chance. Thankfully, they were pretty good. Not the best shrimp ever, but decent, and mostly shrimp, not mostly batter like you often get at some places, especially "fast food" type locations. There were ten large shrimp (not butterflied) in crunchy batter, a pile of fries, and cole slaw (I don't eat cole slaw, but it appeared to be of they "dryer" variety as opposed to the "runny, soupy" variety).

The chocolate cake thing reminds me of a Betty Crocker Warm Delights bowl (of which we are fans for a quick and cheap cake fix) but with fudgy topping. Quite rich. Too rich for me to eat a whole one, in fact.

I also give CHH four happy penguins. And why wouldn't the penguin be happy - it is seafood!

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So thus ended our final actual meal on the DxDP, though we still had a few snack credits to get rid of...

But first we needed to ride POTC, which had been periodically closed most of the day, and so we did... for an hour. Over and over? No, just the once. The pumps died right after the redhead scene and so we wound up sitting there for 45 minutes before they got things moving again.

It was awesome.


More still to come - we ain't done yet.

 

[ShannonMB]

So fantastic. Your pics are out of this world. I almost reached over to grab one of those shrimp off the screen! Love, love, love it!

 

[es45]

Just stumbled on your report while doing a search. Love it!

 

[kxs401]

Just found your report and read through the whole thing. I wanted to let you know how much I loved it -- very funny and your photos are absolutely fabulous.

 

[disneyfan551]

Great reviews!!

 

[cherjp]

really great reviews, you two are hilarious!!!

 

[Golf4food]

Thanks y'all. Glad we could entertain.

We've got just over a month until our next trip and we'll start a pre-trip report soon - maybe next week - and be sure to get lots more pictures (with a fancy new camera upgrade, woo hoo) for our next review.

 

[GaRain]

Love this!!
Your food pictures are awesome - almost makes me wanna eat some of it - which is strange since I am such a picky eater!

Also - LOVE LOVE LOVE PENGUINS! Once asked Bert and Mary to step out so I could have my picture with just the penguins!

 

[darthtatty]

Thanks for your reviews, ive really enjoyed reading them.xx

 

[LuvEeyore]

Love the reviews

 

[Pumbaa_]

Closing the report since it is complete

looking forward to your next review!