Pleasure Island
Well, here we are in Orlando. The weather's pretty phenomenal: balmy with just a soupcon of humidity. With the temperature dropping as low as 60 degrees F at night, the local news is recommending that children, soft and delicate creatures that they are, be sent off in the morning with a jacket. Still not as nice as the Coloradan mountains in fall, but for Central Florida - heaven.
We actually arrived early last night. I think this is the first time this has occurred on American Airlines in the last five or six years of traveling down here. We had not made any reservations for dinner because experience had shown that we'd be too late to take advantage of it and we'd be reduced to searching under the cushions of the couch in our room for stale Cheetos to dine upon. But since our flights were remarkably angst-free (not to mention food-free) we arrived relatively fresh and with a substantial appetite. So we decided to go and check out Pleasure Island at Downtown Disney and see what comestibles we could scrounge.
For those who haven't visited the Greater Orlando area recently (like in the last 30 years) along with theme parks, Disney also had some other entertainment venues. One of the most popular is Downtown Disney/Pleasure Island. Downtown Disney is similar to CityWalk at Universal Studio with a bunch of restaurants and shoppertunities (as Mary likes to call them).
Downtown Disney is mainly shopping with some restaurants thrown in. The Cirque de Soleil complex and House of Blues are also located here. At the other end of the complex is Disney Marketplace which is more shopping and more restaurants. In between the Downtown Disney and Disney Marketplace is the only area that doesn't have Disney in the title - Pleasure Island. Until last month, Pleasure Island was an entertainment venue with several dance clubs, a comedy club and my personal favorite - the Adventurer's Club.
The Adventurer's Club is kind of hard to describe. It was basically a scripted show, though with an immense amount of improv See, I told you it was hard to describe. The Club is decorated as a 1920's twisted and warped version of a British men's club where all the wacky and mostly incompetent explorers that couldn't get into the real explorers' clubs hung out. The show that the actors gave each night was extremely entertaining and original. Of course Disney decided to close it and replace it with more shops and eateries. I am dismayed and disgusted. It was one of the most original entertainment venues within the Disney megaplex and to remove it was truly sad and ill advised in my opinion.
So okay, that was my obligatory rant. Now back to observational chatter with a touch of random information.
From all accounts the current financial crisis has resulted in Americans hunkering down in their bunkers with automatic weapons, Hamburger Helper, and Kruggerrands. So we expected to just saunter through the eerily deserted environs of Pleasure Island to dine at our favorite restaurant there, where we would be greeted with glad cries of "Customers! Quick Luigi, a table for the Customers!" Which would have been a bit strange as we were going to an Irish pub. But I digress.
Our experience did not quite match our expectations. Pleasure Island was packed. Disney Marketplace was packed. Downtown Disney was mobbed with ghoulish zombie hordes. My mistake, just shoppers. We attempted to get a table in Raglan Road, the Irish pub. An hour wait at 7:30 on a Tuesday night. Similar responses at House of Blues and Wolfgang Puck's. Strangely enough though, the one place that was not overrun with customers was the on-site McDonalds. We thought this exceedingly unusual.
Well, maybe there was a convention of well-heeled foreigners from far-off lands who were still spending their enormously inflated foreign currency. So we decided to leave Disney property and check out a restaurant that Mary likes a lot, when she's in the mood for a little casual island noshing - Bahama Breeze. Even there, at 8:30, we were faced with a twenty minute wait.
The food was pretty decent: not the wholesome goodness of deep fried sausages and Guinness that I was hoping for, but pretty good in its own, non-deep-fried manner. Mary and I split an order of crab claws to start - a little overcooked but the flavor was spot-on. We both ended up with the tilapia for entrees but only because they were out of Mary's first choice of mahi-mahi. I went with a Cuban influenced preparation while Mary's tilapia was graced with the delicate and subtle flavors of Jamaican jerk seasonings. Not. Jamaican jerk is supposed to be pretty spicy, and yet her selection wasn't spicy in the least. My dish was spicier than Mary's, and thus better.
So lesson from last night: Americans, at least some Americans, are still out in force at Disney. Indeed from appearances, the Central Florida area has not yet experienced the rampaging hordes of rioters waving their now valueless 401(k)'s around and demanding justice, or at the very least a Big Mac.
