Last week we took Isak and met my parents at Disney World for the week. We go every January near the end and celebrate Isak’s birthday early. It is literally my favorite week of the year. This year, I had lots of people ask me if we were breaking our food rules for the trip. Nope, not at all! It wasn’t the easiest thing to do, I’m not going to lie. Not because there were so many temptations, because at this point, temptations aren’t really a “thing” anymore. Yay keto–cravings disappear. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do because literally, 95% of the food found at Disney contains grains or sugar, which we avoid. There was one night at Epcot where we each had a quarter of a gluten-free roll. It was really good as far as gluten-free goes…but most of that stuff feels like wet sawdust in my mouth, so the texture wasn’t appealing.
The thing about staying keto at Disney is that you have to implement some preparation and research. I did not find any acceptable snacks on the menus of any of the restaurants beforehand when I was researching, so I knew that we were going to have to keep easily portable snacks. Also, there isn’t much in the way of breakfast food (that isn’t ridiculously overpriced), so we knew we were going to keep a bunch of compliant stuff in the fridge at the resort. Typically I don’t eat breakfast because of the intermittent fasting (though as of this week I’ve flipped my fast over, but that’s for a later post), but when we’re walking 10-15 miles a day in the parks, I eat more often.
For the fridge and pantry in the resort, we kept: pre-cooked bacon, black forest ham, cream cheese, french onion dip, string cheese, pork rinds, and pepperoni. If you haven’t tried pork rinds with french onion dip, you’re missing out. Try it now. For portable park snacks, my only requirement was that they didn’t need to be kept chilled. I didn’t want to carry a cooler pack in the park. We carried macadamia nuts. Lots and lots of macadamia nuts. I also kept a few Atkins bars in the bag, and for Isak we had single bags of nut/dried fruit mix.
Now for the fun part…the meals!
Neither of us could remember where the turkey legs were sold at Magic Kingdom, but after asking 900 cast members, we finally got the right location: the tavern in Adventureland, across from Pirates of the Caribbean. This was our first stop as soon as we got to the park. Usually we fly in and wait until the following day to go to the parks; however, we were able to snag an extra day, so JR and I went as soon as we got off the Magic Express and got Isak situated in the resort with Gammy and GrandDan. We split one turkey leg between the two of us and dipped it in a few packets of mayo. Everything tastes better at Disney, you know.
Breakfast on official day one: steamed heavy cream with sugar-free vanilla syrup from Starbucks at Epcot. This is Isak’s favorite drink. He calls it “warm chocolate,” no matter what sugar-free flavor it is. The vanilla though…it tastes like hot-off-the-stove vanilla custard filling. It’s delicious. That and a handful of cashews kept him going until lunch.
This one was my favorite table-service meal of the trip (and yes, I left the handful of fried wonton skins on–they weren’t enough to kick me out of ketosis and Epcot is always where we walk the most). This is the Beijing Roast Duck Salad from Nine Dragons in China, in the World Showcase at Epcot. One alteration had to be made: the hoisin sauce dressing was out because, well, hoisin sauce. Instead, they gave me a small pitcher of the potsticker sauce, which was to die for. Seriously, my favorite meal of the week.
In The Seas, at Epcot, there is a restaurant called Coral Reef. Honestly, we go here for the experience because you’re basically eating inside a giant aquarium. In my opinion, the food is decent, but it’s not the best food ever. I got the grilled New York strip steak with double veg instead of veg and mashed potatoes. We had them bring out extra butter because it wasn’t nearly fatty enough. This is where the gluten-free rolls were. Like I said, as far as gluten-free rolls go, those were pretty good, especially when slathered with butter. If you’re looking for that option, definitely hit up Coral Reef. JR got the heirloom tomato salad thing here. I gave him half of my steak and we pretty much ate off of each other’s plates.
You can’t really tell what this is from the picture, as is frequently the case when making keto alterations, but this is a bacon cheeseburger from Cosmic Ray’s in Magic Kingdom. They have a topping bar there where we added the mushrooms, onions, and (not pictured) some garlic ranch dressing. It was a pretty good burger. JR and I split the burger and…
…the Greek salad, from the same place. It was a pretty rockin’ Greek salad, in case you were wondering. The chicken looks huge, but really it’s just pounded out thin. The feta wasn’t as good as the stuff we get from Ali Baba; however, it was a decent substitute (and let’s be honest, if you don’t have a refined palate for Middle Eastern food, you won’t notice the difference). We also put the garlic ranch on this salad. Yeah, I really liked it.
This was an Italian sausage without the bun from whatever that sausage company is at Disney Springs (what used to be called Downtown Disney). The sausage was our least favorite thing of the trip. It was just “meh.” Those pickles were awesome though. Seriously awesome.
This is actually one of the meals we had at the airport in Atlanta on the way back to San Antonio. I forget what the place was called, but it’s similar to a Chipotle-type deal. It was a steak burrito bowl. Why do deconstructed foods always look like a pile of stomach contents? Regardless, it was tasty.
I didn’t remember to take pictures of all the food we ate in the parks, so here are the other items we had that I can remember:
Chili Cheese Coney without the bun from that Casey’s hot dog place on Main Street in Magic Kingdom (a delicious addition to our curbside seating for the Festival of Fantasy parade!)
Caesar salad with salmon at the Prime Time Diner in Hollywood Studios. This restaurant was so fun! The staff is a hoot and the decor is hilarious. The salad was great.
If you have any questions about going keto-friendly at Disney, feel free to ask me! Before going, I spent an hour on the phone with one of their dietary people, who helped me navigate all of the menus in order to find compliant food that wasn’t all burger-without-a-bun situations. But really, if you’re only going to try one thing from this list, get the salad from Nine Dragons. You won’t be disappointed.
The Keto Foodie 