Orlando

Walt Disney World Resort

Meal

OVERVIEW
Walt Disney World Resort is located in Orlando, Florida and is known as the “most magical place on earth” with 4 major theme parks - Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and Disney’s Animal Kingdom.  Our family had waited twelve years to go back to Disney and the main reason was three of our family members have adult onset of life-threatening food allergies!  We had so much to learn and practice before we could go to a theme park and eat!  Since it had been so long since our last Disney experience, we spent a full week and visited each park.  My daughter and I both suffer from major food allergens.  Hers were tree nuts, gluten / wheat, and celery and mine are fish, tree nuts, and gluten.  I do want to note that each of us have a non-celiac gluten sensitivity and our other food allergies have presented major scary symptoms, but we haven’t had to use an epipen.  Avoiding them has been the key. Here is a list of the restaurants that we enjoyed while we were there:
Spice Road Table
Regal Eagle Smokehouse
The Artists Table
Cokes From Around The World, Epcot
Coral Reef Restaurant
Columbia Harbor House
Plaza Restaurant
Brown Derby
Ohana
Olivia’s 
Snacks from snack stands that we enjoyed:  Popcorn, Mickey vanilla ice cream stick
with chocolate coating, pineapple Dole Whip
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Disney really did a great job of accommodating those with food allergies.  I was impressed to see how it worked.  While dining at a breakfast or lunch spot, they had separate ordering lines and menus to indicate which foods they offered allergen-free and they were marked specific for gluten/wheat allergies, fish/shellfish allergies, peanut/tree nut allergies, and sesame allergies.  The way they were identified on the menu made it easy to see the foods that were safe for you to consume.  We were given a separate food order number and it appeared that it went to a separate area of the kitchen and also came out separate from all other food orders. 

Our food was served with allergen tags and verbal confirmation from the server.

 All of the evening meals that we had were pretty exceptional, nice work Disney.  Our favorites were
Coral Reef and Ohana.  Maybe it was because those places had the best views and amazing allergy-free
dessert options. The silverware or plastic ware came wrapped, pre-wrapped for plastics or dispensed
and napkins were wrapped in the nicer restaurants. 

SUGGESTIONS
The only 2 areas of concern for cross-contamination and allergy issues were the shared tables in the fast food areas, because you couldn’t guarantee a clean table and the condiments were not labeled or marked (unless it was a specialty condiment like honey mustard in some cases).  The fast food restaurants had Disney-branded bottles in large pump containers without listing any ingredients and the finer restaurants distributed condiments in dipping sauce cups.  This is a true area of concern since allergy sufferers need to see what ingredients are in all of their foods before ingesting them.