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What is Magical Dining?
Every year, the Orlando area gets to experience Visit Orlando’s Magical Dining. This means that for about one month (until October 7th this year), 125 local restaurants offer guests a 3-course meal (from a fixed menu) for only $35 per person. This can be a great way to try restaurants that might otherwise be too expensive, and it helps local businesses get recognized.
Which Restaurants are Included?
As we said, there are 125 Orlando-area restaurants to choose from. There is a mix of chain restaurants, local restaurants, and theme-park restaurants at Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando.
Are These Restaurants Celiac-Friendly?
When you go onto the Magical Dining website, you’ll see that you have the option to filter the restaurants by dietary need: gluten-free, vegetarian, or vegan. Once you filter those 125 restaurants to find gluten-free options, you are left with 66 restaurants.
Magical Dining Breakdown
Those 66 gluten-free restaurants might take up a little over half the list of Magical Dining options, but when we looked closer at the menu, we noticed that things weren’t quite so simple.
Fixed Menus
One of the tricky parts of fixed menus is that you can only choose what’s actually there. We’ve run into these problems before (which is why we usually avoid them) because they’re often not celiac-friendly. As many celiacs probably know, finding an appetizer, entree, AND dessert can be a struggle – even with a full menu of options.
Partially Gluten-Free Restaurants
When we broke down the Magical Dining menus listed under gluten-free restaurants, we noticed that many of them only had 1 or 2 courses that had the “GF” symbol beside them. Some restaurants didnt’ even have any allergy information listed on the menu, so it was unclear if these restaurants were gluten-free, or if they were just missing that information.
Almost half (32 out of 66) of the restaurants included under the “gluten-free” section of the Magical Dining website only had 2 gluten-free courses to choose from. In most cases, this was an appetizer and an entree, but no dessert. A couple of these restaurants had appetizers and desserts, but no entrees. So, someone who is gluten-free wouldn’t be able to get the full value out of those Magical Dining menus.
Aside from the restaurants with only 2 gluten-free courses out of 3, over one fifth (12 out of 66) of these restaurants only offered one course: an appetizer OR an entree OR a dessert.
Restaurants that are 100% Gluten-Free
There were still some restaurants on the list that had a full range of gluten-free options. Just under one third (19 out of 66) of these restaurants offered 3 gluten-free courses.
Within these selections, of course, not every option was gluten-free. For example, there might be one appetizer, one entree, and one dessert out of the fixed menu (usually 2-4 items per category), so options are still limited.
Final Thoughts on Magical Dining
In examining the gluten-free Magical Dining offerings, we found that around 1 in 10 restaurants (12 out of the full 125) actually had a full 3-course gluten-free meal offering. That’s not to say that these restaurants (or others) might not be able to adapt food, but if you’re gluten-free and looking for a Magical Dining restaurant, then just from checking out the website you’ll have a hard time finding options.
Another thing that we should note were that some of these restaurants were duplicates. For example, they had 2 different locations of Seasons 52 (one of the fully gluten-free options), so there isn’t as much variety as you’d initially think.
We’ve also eaten at places that aren’t considered “gluten-free” in terms of this fixed menu (like Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants), but Isabelle did not eat off of the Magical Dining menu and just ordered an entree that was on their gluten-free menu.
In our look at Magical Dining, we didn’t even get into other food allergies. If you’re like Isabelle and you have celiac/coeliac disease plus other food sensitivities, then you might not even have any options. For example, most appetizers that were gluten-free contained shellfish or dairy. Most of the desserts also contained dairy (creme brule was a common gluten-free option).
This isn’t to say that Magical Dining isn’t worth a shot, but we do advise calling restaurants in advance if you want to actually enjoy this 3-course meal for $35 offer.