Fine Wine and Dine

California Adventure's Food and Wine Festival

As a big fan of food and festivals, I have been dying to go to the Food and Wine Festival in California Adventure. The biggest limit to these festivals is how much I can fit in my stomach, lol!  We always enjoy so much of the food at Disneyland, so we had to really plan out what we were going to eat here around our various dining reservations.  But we did sample a lot of the foods and drinks here at the festival, so let's begin!

Couple of things that were new to us for this festival were the changes to the Sip and Savor Pass and the free Mickey shaped plate for the festival.  Sip and Savor passes are these great little lanyards you can purchase that will get you either 4 or 8 food items from the various booths.  $32 for a 4-item pass and $63 for an 8-item pass, which is a pretty good deal compared to paying cash for each food item (can't be redeemed for alcohol). The pass has a barcode they scan to redeem for your purchases which I like compared to the old pull tab versions of the sip and savor pass.  The little plate was cute with it's built in Mickey Ear drink holders.  We really didn't use the plate much, but it was great when I needed to carry two drinks with my food order.

Pro tip:  You can order all your food and drink items at one booth and then just pick them up throughout the day at their various locations.  Also highly recommend going during the week as the lines got pretty crazy at the booths over the weekend.

There wasn't nearly as many options or varieties as EPCOT's festivals, but Disneyland rarely disappoints when it comes to food.  Also California Adventure has lots of table set ups and even little bar style tables attached to the railings around the park giving you ample places to eat.  Way better than using a trash can as a make shift table like in EPCOT!

We always expect to see a variety of Churro flavors/options around the parks.  Their churros really are better than over at Disney World!  We also have learned to expect various mac and cheese type dishes, which are often amazing!

We started off really strong with the Birria Mac & Cheese.  Which was the star of the trip, we ended up ordering 4 of these over our various times at DCA.

It was a wonderful cheesy and savory dish, the best of birria tacos on top of a perfectly paired mac and cheese.  The Cafe de Olla Tres Leches Cake was a bit closer to being a Tiramisu with all of it's coffee flavor but still really good.  I was the only one who could drink since Angie is preggers, so I sampled the Watermelon Cucumber Mojito solo.  It was very refreshing. I'm not usually a fan of Tajin but it paired well with this Watermelon cocktail.

Sharing the same space was our next food booth that had the Musubi Fried Rice and Blueberry Pancake Cold Brew.  Fried Spam with a spicy mayo fried rice was really delicious, though a little to spicy for Niko.

Angie absolutely loved the Blueberry Pancake Cold Brew, sweet with a great blueberry flavor.

Niko has quite the sweet tooth, so he had several Churros that he wanted to try.  The Creme Brulee Churro was okay.  The real star was the Strawberry Caramel Churro.  It was just the right amount of sweetness topping the churro goodness.

The Sirloin Gruyere Mac and Cheese was good,  just  not as good as the Birria.  Some nice hunks of steak with a chimichurri on top of mac and cheese was a nice pairing, though the steak pieces could stand to be a little smaller.  The Lemon Pepper wings were okay, they just couldn't outshine everything  else we had already eaten.

I had to double fist my next two drinks, the Guava Lychee Mule and the Mango Guava Cocktail.

Both were a great sweet guava cocktails!  Though I will always be more partial to mango over lychee.  The Sour candy stripe on the mango guava cocktail just put it over the top.  It's not easy sampling all these drinks on my own.

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​We had heard great things about the Asa'dos platter.  It was fantastic!  A nice piece of skirt steak and a drumstick paired with rice, a tortilla, and some salsa verde.  I always love a good skirt steak and this one did not disappoint!

I was a little disappointed with the Loaded Carnitas Pretzel Bites.  The carnitas pork had some really good flavor but it was just sort of a sloppy mess on top of some pretzel bites and cheese.   It's kind of like when you have a great plate of nachos but the chips are all buried under all the toppings making it a mess to eat.

There of course was more to the Festival than just food booths, we just couldn't squeeze everything into our schedule.

There were some Culinary Demonstrations with some visiting chefs and some of our favorite characters.  We caught some of them walking by to prepare for their cooking demo.  I would have liked to try the Beverage Education Seminars or the Carthay Circle Receptions with winemakers and brewers, but wouldn't dare leave Angie for a few drinks.

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This was definitely a special trip for us with our whole gender reveal plans.  It was a little slower going since Angie is halfway through the pregnancy but we had an amazing time on this visit.

We've got another trip planned in a couple of months to check out the Disneyland 70th Anniversary, so check back for more of our pregnant adventures in Disney.  Angie has already said she may need to rent a scooter for this next visit.

As always Mouse O'Clock is here to help you make that next Disney vacation a bit more magical.  Just reach out and we can make that dream vacation come true.

Because when it's time to plan for Disney:

It's Mouse O'Clock!