Dining Reviews: Wine Country Trattoria, & Clarabelle's

For dinner on our first night, we called from our hotel at 5:30pm to make a reservation for 7:30pm.  Not something that you can really do at WDW!  We arrived at Wine Country Trattoria about 15 minutes early and checked in.  They let us know they were running a bit behind (which we could tell because we waited in a line for a good 10 minutes to check-in!)

So we went next door and grabbed a glass of wine to wait.  I had a glass of Prosecco and my Mom had a white wine...I think it was Pinot Grigio.

Plastic glasses, the height of sophistication!

It wasn't long before we were paged and our table was ready.  We had a nice little two-top out on the patio.  It was a gorgeous night and probably our favorite thing about Wine Country Trattoria was being able to sit outdoors and enjoy it (sounds ominous, huh?)

It took a while for our waitress to come over and introduce herself and when she did, she seemed awfully rushed.  Luckily we had already decided what we wanted for dinner...and we already had drinks.  I asked about their wine flights which offered 2 oz pours of 3 wines.  Both flights had at least one red in them, so I asked about the possibility of swapping out the red wine for a white as I can't drink red.  I was flatly told no, there were no substitutions.  Which is fine, but I was a little taken aback as I've never experienced that level of a flat out no at Disney.  Usually it's along the lines of "I wish we could, but unfortunately we're not able to swap out any of the wines."

Anyway, my Mom and I ordered some more wine, the caprese salad to start, I ordered a pasta dish and my Mom had chicken.  We waited quite a while before we had any food, and then to no one's surprise, our main courses came out before the caprese salad.  I felt bad for the guy delivering the food because he didn't know about the salad.  He asked if we still wanted it, but I don't understand why restaurants do that.  No, of course I don't want it now.  Our waitress came over and we mentioned it to her.  To her credit, she did apologize, and made sure it was taken off the bill.

Herb Roasted Chicken Breast

Broccolini Aglio Olio

I forgot about pictures again and had tossed my pasta together.  Oops.  Anyway, the food was okay.  I mean, nothing fancy, nothing to right home about, but it was the right temperature and delivered what was promised.  Not surprisingly, we opted not to order dessert.

Overall, I would probably go back to Wine Country Trattoria again.  I think we missed on our server, but the food was decent.  I would not go out of my way to eat there and probably wouldn't recommend it to others.

Well, if you know me at all, you know I have a giant sweet tooth.  So obviously not ordering dessert at Wine Country Trattoria doesn't mean we skipped it all together!  I had heard about the hand-dipped Ice Cream Bars at Clarabelle's and knew that at some point we would have to give them a try.  What better time that after dinner?!  So off to Clarabelle's we went.  It's located at the end of Buena Vista Street, attached to the new Starbucks.

Look for this sign for ice cream goodness

In addition to the hand-dipped bars, they also have your standard scoops of ice creams and sundaes.  But who wants a sundae when you can customize a bar?!  The options you had for the ice cream for the hand-dipped bars were either vanilla, chocolate or mixed-berry sorbet.  The bar could either be dipped in milk or dark chocolate and you could add your choice of blue raspberry bursts, chocolate chips, Mickey confetti, rainbow sprinkles or "the whole herd."

Mom opted for vanilla ice cream, milk chocolate shell, chocolate chips and blue raspberry bursts.  She said the blue raspberry bursts were really just blue sugar.

Mom's bar

My bar

I opted for vanilla ice cream, dark chocolate shell, Mickey confetti, and rainbow sprinkles.  Somehow I got chocolate chips instead of sprinkles...but really...like I'm going to complain about more chocolate?

I loved that they were served in boats.  The toppings didn't stay on that well, so it was great to not lose any toppings as they fell in the boat...and I may or may not have gotten a spoon...

All in all, it was a fun little treat!  Such a neat idea for something a little different than your average ice cream. I would definitely recommend stopping in and getting one!