Vegan in the World

[Miffy]

Hi everyone. We’ve been back from WDW for two weeks, and it already seems like it was about 100 years ago. In other words: I’m ready for my next trip there, although it won’t be in the heat. Great for using the pool, not so great for General Outdoor Survival.

First, scads of thanks to V_gan, whose posts and photos were immensely helpful. Also helpful were charts on Deb Wills’ site which pointed one in the direction of vegetarian/vegan food at the resorts and in the parks.

I’ve been to WDW many times as a vegetarian, but this was the first time since I became vegan about a year and a half ago. Both my DH and I are vegan (he upconverted from omnivore to vegan—quite a leap!). Finding vegan food at WDW wasn’t as difficult as I thought it’d be, however, I have a disclaimer here: there were some foods whose ingredients we were unable to ascertain and, in the case of bread, we decided they were probably vegan...but maybe they weren’t.

Before I get into the restaurants, let me mention gardengrocer.com, from whom we ordered some food and other items. While we were on DME on our way from the airport, I saw there was a message on my cell phone from gardengrocer, letting me know the food had been delivered and was being stored at AKL’s bell services area, who held our stuff for us (in the fridge, as needed). After we checked in, bell services brought it right to our room. Among the many items that gardengrocer offers is fresh fruit, which was a substantial part of our order, along with 2 different kinds of soy milk (DH and I like different stuff), 2 cases of water, and other, non-food, items (like toilet paper). I can’t say enough nice things about everyone I dealt with at gardengrocer.

We’d also sent ourselves a package with rolled oats, raw nuts, and raisins, along with a big bottle of sunscreen (we don’t check our bags) and other miscellany.

Now, on to the restaurants.

Most, possibly all, of the counter-service restaurants at WDW now have 3-ring binders with ingredients lists in them, and the cashiers (or people behind the counter) will happily show them to you.

The staffs at all the sit-down restaurants we went to were immensely helpful. Jiko has a vegan menu! and really superb food.

But first, the CS places.

...continued in next post...

 

[SuperTink]

Thank you, we're not vegan, but we do want to look for healthy CS meals!

 

[Miffy]

1) Cosmic Ray’s: We had veggie burgers there (they’re Boca vegan burgers—unless they’ve changed them since we were there last year, but I don’t think so). Due to extreme hunger at the time, we didn’t investigate the ingredients of the bun, which we hoped was vegan. I used a hugely liberal amount of lettuce, tomato, and onion from the fixings bar, making it into a veggie-burger-and-salad meal.

We had grapes with the burgers (note: all the CS places will gladly substitute fruit for any of the offered side dishes) and a side of carrots as well. If your cashier can’t find any extra sides you’d like (grapes, carrots, apple slices) on their computer, let them know that they’re listed in the children’s menu section. The burger was good, bun excellent, grapes A++ (as were all the grapes we had at WDW), and the fixings very fresh and tasty.

2) Columbia Harbor House: Here we didn’t look at the ingredients list, either. My apologies. We were starving at the time! However, the cashier was very familiar with what was in what. My DH had the vegetarian chile, which, frankly, isn’t enough food for dinner for a hungry person. I had the hummus sandwich without the slaw (the slaw is made with mayonnaise)—also not a substantially filling dinner item. I think my DH was merely ok with the vegetarian chile, since we went back there later in the trip and he had the hummus sandwich sans slaw, as I did. The sandwich is on delicious whole-grain bread and has yummy hummus, just not enough food for dinner, especially if you’ve walked 5 miles that day.

Right outside Columbia Harbor House are carts which sell corn on the cob and baked potatoes. The corn on the cob is made with butter already on it—it’s prepared before the cart vendor gets it, so there’s no way to eliminate the butter, and therefore, it’s not vegan. The potatoes, however, are just potatoes—the butter and other accoutrements come separately—so the potatoes would’ve been a nice vegan addition to the kind of sparse meal we had at CHH. As it turned out, though, because we were hungry 3 hours later, we were treated to one of the best meals we had the entire stay, at AKL’s CS restaurant, #3 below.

 

[Miffy]

3) The Mara (CS at AKL): We stayed at AKL (aka Animal Lovers’ Paradise aka Vegan Paradise!). Let me digress here for a sec to say that we could barely tear ourselves away from our room’s splendid view of the Arusha Savanna and all the animals. But, back to the food. The night we ate at CHH, we came back to the Lodge pretty hungry. The Mara was just about to close, but everyone there was ultra-nice and ultra-helpful. Could we have a pizza without the cheese? Sorry, it’s prepared ahead of time, complete with cheese. Hmmm. How about X? or Y? We explained to them that we were both vegan. A few moments later, out of the back emerged TJ, a Boma chef. I’m guessing that the Mara and Boma share the interior kitchen space.

TJ knew exactly what the contents of all the food was at the Mara. For example, the pita bread there has egg in it—not vegan. So he asked us a bit about what we liked, went back into the kitchen and emerged with the ingredients for a veggie wrap. Calling it a mere veggie wrap is really pretty insulting. It was a gourmet dinner. Hummus, olives, watercress that he’d marinated in something (perhaps a Boma dish?), all kinds of other veggies, and not 1 but 2 pieces of wrap bread. Served with ginger-infused couscous and some other stuff, I forget what now, but I’d be more than happy to eat this for dinner every night for maybe the next 2 months. Then I’d need to take a break for a night or two, perhaps with a Jiko meal.

We had a reservation at Boma later in our stay and TJ said to make sure to get the staff to come get him and he’d prepare loads of vegan stuff for us. As it turned out, though, we never made it to Boma, and in fact we’ve never been to Boma—which is supposed to be one of the best vegan dining experiences at WDW. This is only further reason to go back to WDW again, and soon.

There are several different fruit selections at the Mara: bananas, apples, grapes, mixed fruit cup with melon, watermelon, and maybe more things that I’m forgetting. They also have a cup with a nice-sized serving of carrot and celery sticks. Everything we had from this bunch of stuff was quite good.

The Mara carries a couple of vegan-friendly packaged snacks (pretzels, potato chips, and maybe others) and—check this out—a pack of 2 vegan chocolate-chip cookies! (Divvies: you’re supposed to share them! Good luck on that.) I noticed them the first night and resisted. I mean, I never eat stuff like that. I’m sure you know where this is leading. By the 4th night, I had to have them, just to see if they tasted like chocolate chip cookies. They were so good that I grabbed another pack before we went to meet DME for our return flight. I’m just glad that these cookies are not located anywhere near my apartment, because I’d probably gain about 300 pounds in maybe a month. Delish.

For breakfast, the Mara’s oatmeal is vegan (and excellent, btw). Ingredients: oatmeal, water, salt. The portion they give is easily enough for 2 people. They also have many cold cereals on hand. Also soy milk in their fridge.

4) Liberty Inn (at the American Adventure in Epcot): Veggie burger (it must be the Boca vegan burger) with liberal fixings. We later had the same thing at Restaurantosaurus (in DAK). At neither place did we check the ingredients of the buns, instead hoping for the best. The buns were different on all 3 veggie burgers we had, all just fine. All the fixings bars had really fresh ingredients—lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, relish, etc. You can take as much as you want...and we did!

5) Electric Umbrella (at Epcot): Their vegetarian wrap is vegan. Here we got to see the entire ingredients list, but because we saw that the wrap has hydrogenated oil in it, we decided against it. Not that there isn’t hydrogenated (or partially hydrogenated) oil in other breads we ate, but we saw for a fact that this had it, and my DH also saw someone with the wrap on their tray and noted how tiny it was, so we passed on this one.

Just in case you think we’re huge eaters and we’re judging the size of portions by Big Standards, in fact, DH and I are both lightweights and aren’t into huge portions. So if we think something’s kinda small, you might think so, too.

6) Tangierine Cafe (Morocco at Epcot): We also saw the ingredients list here, however, the Moroccan bread—which came with the veggie platter—was not on the list. We noticed this at several sit-down restaurants, too. Many of the restaurants have their bread supplied by outside bakeries and the staff has no idea and no way of knowing what the ingredients are. This was true of Mama Melrose’s and Tony’s Town Square as well.

At any rate, the vegetarian platter at Tangierine Cafe is not completely vegan. The lentils are prepared with mayonnaise. They were very accommodating and told us we could substitute any of the other dishes for the lentils, so we got extra hummus. The tabouleh is particularly good. Everything else also just fine. I suspect the Moroccan bread is made with some kind of shortening, most likely a hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oil. I realize this is still vegan, but it’s not the world’s healthiest ingredient. Just to let you know. We ate it anyway. In fact, we ate a lot of food at WDW that although it was vegan, it wasn’t something we’d ordinarily eat. We’re more of the fresh food ingredients bent at home, but at WDW we relaxed our stiff standards.

7) Kaki Gori (Japan at Epcot—an outdoor cart): They serve shaved-ice treats drenched with several different fruit flavors. You get to pick what you’d like from 5 flavors or so, and can get a rainbow combination. The cherry was outstanding. My DH had this and I had a few tastes, pretty darn good. Someone else noted that it’s like a snow cone, only a lot better, and I’d have to agree. The fruit flavorings were superior to any snow cone I’ve ever encountered. Two tiny Japanese women were making the stuff the day we were there, but an American guy was taking the orders. There was a fascinating drama going on between the two women, but my Japanese is not good enough to know what they were saying.

 

[Miffy]

Yes! There's more for those of you not completely bored yet!

Before I talk about the FS restaurants, I want to mention that we didn’t keep one of the ADRs we’d made before the trip. Usually we go to WDW in January, when, frankly, ADRs are completely unnecessary. But after asking around a bit on the DIS, I decided that for a trip at the end of May, my January strategy was not going to work. So I made several ADRs before we left. I figured that the worst that’d happen is that we’d cancel them—which is what we ended up doing in all but 1 case, where we were able to move our reservation forward 40 minutes. I called Disney Dining from my seat at Beauty & the Beast (before the show! not during it), explained that the show wasn’t going to end in time for us to keep our 2 pm ressie at MM, and they instantly changed it for us. Very easy.

We ate everywhere we wanted to without extreme-advance ADRs (one of the meals we had at Jiko we reserved that morning, so we did have an ADR for it, but the other meal we ate there as walk-ups), and everything turned out fine. One of the reasons for this is probably that we’re pretty flexible, so I don’t want to lead anyone down the Wrong Path. We also don’t mind eating late or early, if it fits in with the rest of our day.


1) Yak and Yeti: This isn’t the first FS place where we ate, but I want to talk about it first, because their menu is not just not very vegetarian-friendly, it’s completely non-vegan. The lo mein, which they’ll make with just veggies and leave out the meat choices, has egg in it, so it’s not vegan. We were so taken with the design and decor of Y&Y that we really wanted to eat there, so we asked the fellow at the front desk what, if anything, they could do for us. He said they could make us stir-fried or steamed veggies with rice (and he didn’t sound too hopeful it’d be any good) and that was about it.

We took a walk around Anandapur, thought about it, and decided to give it a go. We often have steamed veggies and rice for dinner anyway, and we wanted to have a meal in this beautiful space. We were a walk-up and they told us it’d be 30 minutes before we were seated. Less than 10 minutes later, we were in our seats and having a lovely chat with our server, whose name I don’t remember. My apologies. He was wonderful.

He spoke to the chef, and came back to let us know we could have either of the 2 choices the front-desk person had told us about. We ordered the veggies steamed. This is the only meal I took photos of. V_gan has a load of photos in her posting. I apologize for not taking more pix, though, because the pix are super-helpful.

To say that these were steamed veggies and rice makes it seem like they were limp old things just sitting there, hoping to be consumed by 2 desperate vegans. However, they were not. The dishes were truly excellent. The tofu they put in with the steamed veggies was, in fact, stir-fried, but we forgave them for that, particularly as it was amazingly tasty. The chef must’ve looked at the platters and wanted to add some interest to them.

The jasmine rice was out of this world (and far far far too large a portion), there were more than enough steamed veggies (carrots, red peppers, bok choy, broccoli, etc., etc., take a look at the photos) to make for a tremendously satisfying meal, and the whole thing was just great. This specially made-for-us feast cost a mere $35.80, including a 20% tip.

I made a point on the way out of telling the front-desk CM how delicious our meal had been, so maybe he won’t be discouraging vegans in the future.

Here are the Before and After photos of our meal:

I did finish the carrots in my rice dish, but I couldn't finish the rice, even though it was spectacular. There was just too much of it! Thank you, Y&Y.

 

[Miffy]

2) Jiko: What can I say about Jiko? If this restaurant were anywhere near my NYC apartment, I’d be eating there for every special and medium-special occasion. Beautiful atmosphere, lovely staff, tremendously accommodating. They have a vegan menu! There aren’t 100 selections on it, but there’s quite enough to make me and DH very very happy.

At our first meal at Jiko, DH and I split the following dishes: kalamata olive flatbread without cheese, field greens salad (omg, this is so good), an appetizer called Taste of Africa (the vegan version), fantastic squares of bread with caraway seeds on it (our waiter assured us this was vegan and, in fact, packed up the extra pieces he’d brought us to take back to the room—we ate it all the next day, when it was just as delish), the main vegan/veg entree--Grains, Peas, and Vegetables. These 4 dishes were more than enough food for DH and me. In fact, when we went back and ate there again, we ordered less food and were just as full and satisfied afterwards.

Everything we’ve ever eaten at Jiko (whether vegetarian or vegan) has been outstanding and the 2 meals we had there on this trip were no exception. DH and I both love it there. I recommend it to all vegetarians and vegans and omnivores.

Because we ordered so little (by WDW standards, since we didn’t order even 2 entrees), neither of the meals we had there was all that expensive. The first meal, where we ordered more food, including the entree, totaled $62 (all the totals include a 20% tip), and the second meal (which was more than more than enough food) was $43.

BTW, we walked-up the 2nd time. If you’re happy to sit at the “counter” (The Cooking Place), it’s pretty easy to be a walk-up and get seated without much of a wait (we waited maybe 2 minutes). DH and I love sitting at the counter, watching the staff, and hanging out. It’s very pretty and we have a special fondness for that locale since we ate our first Jiko meal there. The first time I heard about Jiko was on a Samantha Brown show many years ago, and I distinctly remember her sitting at the counter, too. Thank you, Samantha!

3) Mama Melrose’s (at DHS): I know this isn’t a favorite of many people on the DIS, but DH and I always eat here and we’ve never had a bad meal, so we always go back. I already delineated the easily maneuvered change of ADR.

They seated us at a table I couldn’t deal with when we got there (another approximately 2-minute wait, btw), since I’d been beaten down on by the sun while watching High School Musical, and I wanted to sit somewhere dark, dark, dark and not see out any windows. They gladly moved us.

Many thanks to our lovely waitperson, Jean. We explained that we were vegan, the terrific chef came over (I’ve forgotten his name! So sorry. He was unbelievably nice.) and discussed what we’d like, which was easy, because spaghetti marinara (no cheese and we checked to make sure the noodles and sauce were vegan) is right up our gastronomic alley. BTW, spaghetti marinara is not on the menu. I’ve never seen it on MM’s menu, but we always order it and they always make it for us.

DH got a slightly spicy version of the sauce on his and I got regular. Both good. Both plenty plenty of food. We were ravenous, or, honestly, one portion between the 2 of us would’ve sufficed. We also had a lovely vegan salad and we ate the Italian bread, whose ingredients the staff doesn’t have a clue about since it’s brought in from somewhere else. It didn’t taste like there were any non-vegan ingredients in it, but you never know.

The salad, the spaghetti, the marinara, the bread, our lovely waitperson, the wonderful chef, and the nice cool dark place all added up to a good meal. It’s not gourmet, it’s not Jiko, but it was just fine, especially for 2 people who rarely eat pasta—so it was a treat for us. Price, just under $40.

4) Tony’s Town Square (MK): Crazy us walked up to the podium at TTS and asked if there was anything available. No. That place is always a madhouse. Part of the chaotic ambiance of TTS is made worse by the tile flooring, but if you’ve eaten there, you know the good, bad, and ugly about the place. We were at MK and didn’t want to have a CS dinner and another pasta meal sounded good to us.

Ok, sez I to the front-desk CM, got anything later? The tremendously harried fellow said he had an opening at 8:45. It was 6:30 at the time and we were starving. We took the ressie anyway, assured by the front-desk fellow, who checked the official park schedule, that Spectromagic (I didn’t want to miss it at 9) was also running a later show.

DH cleverly figured out that we could have a snack at CHH and come back for dinner if we were still hungry, which we were very hungry, so we went back. At that point, half of the crowd at MK was hanging around waiting for Spectromagic, but we were hungry enough not to care.

We were the last 2 people to be seated at TTS that night. The 2 couples who were ahead of us (unknown to me if they’d had ADRs for 6 months or 2 hours) both got seated in lackluster tables near archway between the restaurant and the waiting area, but—ready for this?—we were seated on the patio at the railing, with a perfect view of the parade! Wow!

Our personable and unhurried waitperson, James M, easily organized our vegan spaghetti marinara (we ordered just one plate) and, at my request, had the kitchen make me a vegan salad that was easily 3x as large as their regular side salad, yet I was charged merely 2x as much for it. Note to vegans: the salad there, even without the cheese, still has cheese, since the dressing is a Greek-style dressing. The waiter knew this and brought me bottles of oil and balsamic vinegar, which was just fine.

Their French-loaf bread is of unknown ingredients, but, like MM, seemed like it must be vegan. Anyway, we ate it, it was pretty good. DH and I both enjoyed the meal, enjoyed our view of the parade, and had a great experience there. Go figure. Not the usual TTS story, even for us, since we’ve been rushed through our meal there in the past and had truly awful table locations and super-harried not very attentive waiters. I suspect most of the table locations in TTS are not so hot. But this was an all-round good and pretty magical experience.

Many thanks to the chef for putting together a large salad for me. Many thanks to Mickey for arranging the parade-view table. The meal cost just under $40.

And, having nothing at all to do with food, I just thought I'd throw in this picture of the awesome rainbow we saw on June 2, our last night at WDW. They really know how to do things right there!:

That’s it. That’s enough, isn’t it? Any questions, please ask.

 

[gramto2boys]

wonderful!!!
my sister is total vegan, I tend to be vegitarian. I sent her this URL as she is going to the world for the very fisrt time ( ours to) and so I want to be sure to include her on the resutrant decisions. heck she can make all the reservations and we will all be happy. thank you, I am sure this helped her, or will when she comes on

 

[Teresa Pitman]

Thank you for this! I'm vegan too and love eating at WDW. TJ is one of my personal heroes - he's made us a number of outstanding special meals. On my last trip, in February, I was with a friend who had never been to WDW before. We went to Boma, and when I told our server that I was vegan, she went to get TJ. He said "I remember you!" (we do go fairly often and ALWAYS eat at Boma) and told me he'd make me something special. Well, he certainly did, and my friend was highly impressed that the chef remembered me! I love how TJ makes you feel so good about being vegan!

Teresa

 

[chloelovesdisney]

Hi. Thanks for your posts. My sister is a vegan and I'm always interested in getting new info/ideas for her. She's been very lucky and has had some great vegan meals in DW.

 

[Joyful Pixiedust]

Thanks for this wonderful review. DH & I have been vegans for less than a year, and we visited WDW in February, and were delighted at the selections and choices available to us.
The Artist Palette at SSR is another awesome CS choice with plentiful Veg options.
And, our favorite "break the bank" meal once per visit is at Cali Grill, which certainly didn't disappoint with their vegan accommodations.

You made my mouth water - and I can't wait to go back!