When visiting the Disneyland Park, many guests will find themselves facing the dilemma of whether to eat at the park or risk wandering out of the park to indulge in less expensive delights. As a compromise, a lot of people end up eating in Downtown Disney, which is still located within the official property, but not quite as overpriced as the parks themselves.
A popular choice amongst these Downtown Disney options is the Rainforest Cafe. And it makes sense, the animatronic elephants, butterflies and gorillas are the closest thing to a Disney attraction offered outside the realm of Disney. If you do decide to eat here, call ahead on your cell phone to book a reservation because the wait can often be an hour or more if you don’t.
The food here is still way more than it would be anywhere else. I’ve found the nachos appetizer to be one of the better deals. Even though it is around $15, the dish includes a lot of chips, hamburger meat, veggies, black beans, cheese, sour cream, and salsa -meaning it’s more than enough food for one person. Generally, my boyfriend and I have ordered this and and something on the lighter side and shared. When you do this, you can ensure your meal ends up being around $15 per person, which is actually pretty low for anything in and around the parks.
The burgers are good, but they are about average for a restaurant of this type, nothing too special and for $12 with a bag of potato chips, they aren’t exactly cheap.
Even so, the entertainment of the half hour rainforest shows makes up for the slight overpricing and it’s certainly going to be better food for a better price than anything you’ll get in the park. Overall, you’d probably be better off skipping the Rainforest Cafe in San Francisco and Las Vegas, but when visiting Disneyland, it’s a good call, especially for those who have children with them.
There was a time where anyone asking about bakeries in El Cajon would immediately get barraged with stories about Howard’s Bakery and their amazing cakes, cookies, donuts, etc. It seems this era has come to a close though.
This little diamond in the rough is more like a cubic zirconium in a trailer park. It’s just nothing special. On a recent visit, my boyfriend and I indulged in a fruit tart (once my favorite thing they sold here), a small slice of cake and a bag of day old cookies. While nothing was outright bad, nothing was impressive either.
The fruit tart was covered in that weird clear syrup you’ll find at grocery store bakeries. The custard was too thick and almost plasticy and the pie crust was chaulky. While the flavors were acceptable, the texture was rather gross.
The cake slice was dried out and the frosting was uninspired, none of the heavenly buttercream I remembered Howard’s selling years ago. As for the cookies, one of the flavors was chocolate and one was just a sugar cookie. They both were good, but no better than some of the boxes of cookies I’ve bought at the 99 Cents Only stores. Certainly they were not the quality you would expect from a bakery that has been in business for decades.
All in all, there are a lot better places in San Diego to get your sweet fix, even the grocery store.
If you’re looking to get your family something special this year without spending a huge chunk of money, consider making them delicious food gifts. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Just about everyone loves fudge an a cute tin filled with this great German chocolate fudge recipe will surely bring some smiles.
Canning is always a good call. You can make some unique jams your family can’t find in stores, like this guava jam recipe. Pumpkin butter is also a great gift. And so is lemon curd.
Pickling is also a good call, particularly if it involves foods directly from your garden. This pickled tomato recipe sounds great and doesn’t require processing in a canner.
While most Americans are wary of munching down citrus peels, a bit of these candied citrus peels will quickly change their mind, particularly if it is also filled with these beautiful candied orange slices.
For something beautiful and incredibly simple, try combining honey, dried fruit and nuts in a clear jar.
Food mixes allow you to give the recipient something they can make themselves without much effort. As a bonus, it’s easy to make these look fun and festive.
For those crafty enough, homemade stuffed animals are great gifts for kids and women alike.
Breaking from my general cheapskateness, I opted to let my mother take me out to Stone World Bistro in Escondido for my birthday dinner. It seemed like a good option as they have a reputation for fine food and the brewery tour would allow us some entertainment prior to dinner.
We agreed to meet at the restaurant at five, but my mom ended up showing up almost an hour early, which is good because otherwise we would have missed the six o’clock tour because apparently you need to get there around two hours early to get your pass. After waiting for an eternity, we took the tour, which was somewhat interesting, but certainly not worth a half an hour wait, let alone two hours. Afterward, you get four free beer samples. Unfortunately, you don’t get to choose your samples, so if you aren’t big on the flavors offered…oh well. Even so, it was a nice, free experience.
Moving on to dinner, things got progressively worse. The highlight of the entire meal was my Wandering Aengus hard apple cider, which was delightfully sweet and fruity, perhaps the best cider I’ve ever ordered. Even so, it’s pretty bad when the best part of your meal has nothing to do with the restaurant itself.
The menu and the crowds should have been warnings in themselves, as there was no cohesiveness to anything. People with dredlocks and mohawks were sitting beside yuppies. Some people were dressed up, others were in jeans and tee shirts. The menu was equally chaotic. Kimchee, sausages, shepards pie, tofu stir-fry, paella, and duck tacos were amongst the many incohesive options available. It wasn’t as if this was world-fusion cuisine; there was no fusion about it, just a random selection of dishes from around the globe.
We started out with the mac n’ beer cheese. I won’t lie, it was great. There were homemade sausage slices blended in with macaroni in a rich cheese and beer sauce. The problem, one bowl, as an appetizer, was around $15. Keep in mind, this is at a place that serves practically no side dishes with your entrees and doesn’t even give you free bread with your meal, so you pretty much need to order an appetizer to feel at all full by the end of your meal.
My mother’s boyfriend and I both ordered the Australian wagyu top sirloin. While it tasted great and was quite tender, I couldn’t help but laugh at the fact that the restaurant seems to pride itself on locally sourced ingredients, only to purchase beef from all the way across the globe. It seems a little hypocritical to me. For $30 a pop, I would at least hope for a good-sized stead or some good sides, but the cut was fairly small and all I got with it was a thin layer of diced potatoes under the steak, two carrot slices, two undercooked slices of gold potatoes and two thin broccoli florets. Of everyone at the table, the two of us with steak were the only two happy with our meals.
My mom ordered the chicken schnitzel, which had so many herbs in it that you couldn’t taste the chicken at all. It was so overwhelming you had to wait a minute after each bite to even clear your palate enough to taste anything beside the herbal flavor.
As for my boyfriend, he ordered the “artisinal sausage times 4,” which is an appetizer that is supposed to consist of four different sausages. He only got two sausages, both of which were mediocre at best. The sausages came with potatoes and cabbage, which would at least make the item somewhat filling, were it not for the fact that the cabbage was so terrible it wasn’t even edible. I have no idea what they did to strip the cabbage of any flavor and just make it purely nauseating, but they managed it. The potatoes weren’t as bad, but they were utterly bland. All in all, you’d damn well expect more from an appetizer that costs around $20.
By the end of the night, a cider, a glass of wine, two iced teas, two appetizers and three entrees came out to be over $150. The worst part is that the mediocre meal left all of us hungry by the night’s end. If you’re going to shell out that kind of money, you’d better at least get some pretty good food and some leftovers.
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