World Food Guide:Where to Eat in Orlando and Disney

Where to Eat in Orlando and Disney

 

W e beg you, Orlando locals cry, don’t judge our city by the theme park foods of your childhood vacations. Today, talented chefs are making the City Beautiful a sophisticated dining destination in its own right. Similarly, discriminating diners might be pleasantly surprised by the diversity of meal and snack options within Disney’s Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Hollywood Studios, Animal Kingdom, and Downtown Disney complex.

Culinary travelers seeking the city’s best tables will find that most are situated beyond the tourist corridor (comprising the Disney, Universal, and SeaWorld theme parks as well as the convention center area), so allow a 15- to 30-minute drive to find the headliners and insider favorites. Sprinkled throughout Orlando’s leafy neighborhoods, they range from wallet-friendly holes- in-the-wall to farm-to-table gastropubs to white-tablecloth establishments offering top-tier service.

So serious is the city’s emerging culinary scene that five Orlando-area chefs have been named regional James Beard Award semifinalists for 2013. Besides New Orleans, that’s more than from any other metropolitan area in the South. If you’re traveling to the region with children, keep in mind that all but the tippy-top dining rooms will welcome them. Inside the parks and out, anticipate kid-friendly menus and diversions ranging from simple paper/crayon combos to bendable Wikki Stix and moldable raw pizza or tortilla dough.

World Food Guide:Where to Eat in Orlando and Disney