12 new Disney Food & Wine Festival 2024 dishes ranked best to worst – Daily News

Foodies flocked to Disney California Adventure for the annual Food & Wine Fest to sample and share small plates highlighting California-grown ingredients while grazing from one booth to the next on an epicurean adventure.

The 2024 Disney California Adventure Food & Wine Festival kicked off on Friday, March 1 and runs through April 22 with local, celebrity and Disney chefs offering cooking tips during culinary demonstrations, tasting seminars and signature events.

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The centerpiece of the festival are the 10 marketplace booths offering 12 new food items during this year’s event. DCA eateries and food stands as well Downtown Disney restaurants also serve festival fare.

Disney trimmed three marketplace booths from the festival this year (Berry Patch, I Heart Artichokes and Avocado Time) while adding a new booth focused on plant-based meat (Earth Eats).

A Sip and Savor card that can be used at food and beverage stands throughout the festival costs $61 for 8 items with a $5 discount for Magic Key annual passholders. This year there is also a $31 Sip & Savor pass good for 4 items with no passholder discount.

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You don’t have to buy your food at the booth where it’s served. The best bet is to figure out everything you want to eat and order it all at once from the register stand with the shortest line. Then you can pick up your food whenever you want.

The Cluck-A-Doodle-Moo booth had the shortest line with the most open cashiers on opening day — in part because it was furthest from the front entrance and had the least festival traffic.

I was thrilled to see Disney replaced the tear off tabs with a QR code on the Sip & Savor Card. I was disappointed to see the marketplace booth names dropped from the receipt you need to hang onto to redeem all your purchased food items. The numbers are listed in the Tasting Passport but not on the booths, making it harder to know where to go to get each item.

I tried all 12 new foods on the menus of the festival marketplace booths and here’s what I liked from best to worst at DCA’s 2024 Food & Wine Festival.

1) S’mores Caramel Tart

California Craft Brews

The S’mores Tart was my most anticipated new item at the Food & Wine Festival and it didn’t disappoint.

Disneyland does sugar better than anybody. I was sold just looking at the delicate graham cracker tart shell filled to the brim with chocolatey ganache deliciousness.

Make sure you dig deep with every bite so you get all of the caramel gooeyness at the bottom of the tart.

The toasted marshmallow on top stuck to everything — my fork, my lips and the roof of my mouth. I was in culinary heaven.

2) BBQ Pulled Pork Mac & Cheese

Nuts About Cheese

The Food & Wine Festival always does two or three Mac & Cheese dishes and this year’s new entry ranks up there as one of my all-time favorites.

Mac & Cheese is one of my five basic food groups — so this is what I’d order at the festival if I wanted a go-to favorite.

The sweet BBQ sauce and the crispy dill pickle onions were the best parts of a truly great Mac & Cheese dish.

Disney tends to keep the festival booth foods at a sample size in order to encourage grazing and roaming while you eat.

The BBQ Pulled Pork Mac & Cheese isn’t quite entre sized, but you get more for your buck with this dish than anything else at the marketplace booths.

3) Cheeseburger Bao

California Craft Brews

The Cheeseburger Bao was the surprise hit of the 2024 Disney Food & Wine Fest.

Imagine if In-N-Out served a bao burger and you get the idea of what Disney’s chefs were going for with this off-beat winning combo.

It delivers everything you’re hoping for in a festival food: An unexpected mash-up of cultures that tastes great while still staying true to its origins.

The grilled onions, diced pickles and tomato relish sprinkled atop the bao along with the Thousand Island dressing really helped sell the cheeseburger concept.

The dish looked 100% like a bao bun from the outside until you took a bite. The soft boa bun didn’t have a ton of taste and as a result there wasn’t much in the way of Asian flavors.

4) Carnitas-style Pork Belly

LA Style

I had high expectations for this one and this year’s pork belly dish didn’t let me down.

Disney chefs have the savory and slightly greasy pork belly dialed in and the question is what they will pair it with each year.

The Mexican street corn macaroni salad had a little kick thanks to a dusting of Tajin Habanero.

The Mac Salad would have been great as a separate dish. I hope Disney’s culinary team finds a way to bring back the Tajin Mac Salad in different presentations in years to come.

5) Cheese Pizza-flavored Wings

Cluck-A-Doodle-Moo

The Pizza Wings had a nice level of heat — what I like to call “Theme Park Spice.” Just hot enough to notice, but not too much to offend anyone.

The pizza flavor was really pronounced and a perfect pairing — like you went to a pizza and wings shop and the cook got creative in the kitchen.

The wings came with ranch dip, but I didn’t bother with it too much. The wings tasted great without the dip, which I only needed if I had wanted to cool down the spice. That definitely wasn’t the case here.

Wings are standard fare at the Food & Wine Fest. I’d get these again.

6) Impossible Beef Stroganoff

Earth Eats

I have a bad attitude about fake meat. I figure if you want meat flavor, then eat meat. If you’re vegan or a vegetarian, eat vegetables.

So I’m always pleased when Disney creates a winning dish using Impossible meat that doesn’t leave me wondering what that flavor is in my mouth that most certainly is not beef, chicken or seafood.

The Impossible Beef Stroganoff takes the crown this year as the best plant-based dish at all the festival marketplace booths.

The Impossible beef tossed with egg noodles, mushroom cream sauce and sour cream doesn’t leave you with any of those mystery meat worries or wonders.

It just tastes good — and that’s all that matters whether you’re a pescatarian, flexitarian or carnivore.

7) Shrimp Papas Locas

Peppers Cali-Ente

The Papas Locas was a tasty, cheesy, messy combo with a little kick from the jalapeno sauce and the chipotle on the shrimp.

The biggest disappointment was the skimpy amount of shrimp in the dish.

The whole thing was slathered atop a base of cheddar-bacon potatoes.

There was a lot going on with the Papas Locas that reminded me of sloppy potato nachos.

8) Olive Oil Cake

D-Lish

This beautiful little cake was moist and fluffy with a zesty lemon flavor.

The refined bite-sized dessert was glazed with lemon curd, topped with vanilla bean Chantilly and finished with fresh candied lemons, strawberry crunch and lemon-lime gelee.

The olive oil in the name refers to the preparation rather than the taste.

The cake would go perfectly with an ice cold rink on a warm spring day.

9) Frozen Old Fashioned

Golden Dreams

I almost didn’t order the Frozen Old Fashioned because I thought it was a nonalcoholic drink. It would take another entire review to taste test all the drinks at the festival.

The bourbon-flavored ice cream bar didn’t taste much like bourbon or an Old Fashioned cocktail, but it was still cool, delicious and fun.

The best part of the experience was all the bitters crema, orange zest glaze and boba-like cherry spheres layered on top of the ice cream.

There was a stick in the ice cream bar, but there’s very little chance anybody could enjoy it as a hand-held dessert — unless they wanted the ice cream streaming down their arm.

You’ll have to eat it fast or else you’ll need a straw to slurp up this novel take on the classic cocktail.

I’m not sure I would order the Frozen Old Fashioned again, but I would certainly recommend it to others.

10) Raspberry Almond Cake

Uncork California

The dense almond cake had plenty of raspberry flavor thanks to the raspberry mousse and fresh berries, but it was my least favorite dessert in the festival marketplace booths.

If you like your desserts on the moist and not-too-sweet side, then the Raspberry Almond Cake might be for you.

This just wasn’t what I was looking for.

11) Impossible Chicken Parm Bites

Earth Eats

If you’ve eaten chicken all your life, then the chicken nuggets in the Impossible Chicken Parm Bites will taste like overcooked cafeteria leftovers.

If you don’t eat meat, then this fake chicken will taste great because you don’t know what you’re missing.

The tomato and cheese sauces with grated parmesan tasted like cheese pizza to me.

The real problem here were the bites, which looked like they were stamped out of a machine.

We eat with our eyes before we eat with our mouths — and these nuggets looked like they came out of a bag at the back of the freezer.

How hard would it be for Impossible to make chicken nuggets that looked like they came from real chunks of chicken?

12) Baja-style Fish Taco

LA Style

The audience for this plant-based taco is clearly vegans and vegetarians — and they will likely be thrilled to find another dish on the menu made for them.

The problem is the Tasting Passport booklet refers to the item as a Baja-style Fish Taco with a little tiny leaf after the name. You wouldn’t know the “fish” was plant-based unless you looked at the key at the bottom of the page.

That makes a big difference here because the “fish” is soy and chickpeas. The only way to know that is to ask at the booth. But most people are not going to ask if the fish taco really has fish in it.

What you’re eating here is basically a cabbage slaw salad with cilantro-lime crema and pico de gallo wrapped in a tortilla. The salad is tangy and refreshing and would go great with a lager or pilsner from the California Craft Beer booth.

There’s not much of that chickpea fish substitute — and when you eventually find it, it doesn’t taste or look much like fish.