An Evening Tour Of Food & Wine..

We do it every year. It really is an easy way to explore and eat. I would suggest putting however much you want to spend on a gift card that you can purchase at the festival center and I think the store too. This way you can easily swipe it at the booths and not go over your budget. You might want to reconsider $100 for the 3 of you though. I would say maybe $150 if you plan on making it your dinner plus enjoying drinks. That would give you $50 a person. Or maybe $130 since the teenager won't be drinking alcohol.

A Thursday night shouldn't be too bad but keep in mind that there will be lines at the booths. I have never found it to be a mood killer but some people find the lines to be a little disconcerting. We think of it as part of the fun and to be honest, even on Friday and Saturday nights of our trips we haven't found the crowds to be overly annoying (but maybe thats just because we've been drinking around the world )

Eating at the booths during Food and Wine festival...what a novel idea!

we have a few evenings planned for eating our way round the world....

We're going to do this several times during our November week, and probably still won't have time to sample everything we'd like to try. Grazing the F&W festival booths in lieu of eating a normal meal is one of my favorite things to do at WDW.

This is the only way that we eat dinner at Epcot, even when it's not F&W! We try to time it so we enjoy our dessert during Illuminations.

We plan on doing this aswell as our meals!!!! with being on the DDP we have TS every day so fitting my F&W food around it!!!

we had a gift card last year and they come with stretchy wristband that is very handy so you don't lose it!!!

yep that's the one!!!!

I think so I'm sure we did something like that last year because we had spare money and we used it to buy some stuff in mouse gears and I'm sure there wasn't enough on the card for it????

I don't think you can get the money refunded back to you, but you can use it just like any other Disney gift card and make purchases elsewhere with it.

If you only have $20 on the card and want to buy something at the booths for $25 you would just use the card for the $20 and then pay $5 in cash/credit or whatever

Isn't snacking at the various booths the whole point of F&W?

You can also load more cash onto the card at some of the festival booths if necessary. We do that quite a bit - put $100 on the card and then reload when we get low. And yes, use it anywhere that accepts Disney gift cards in lieu of cash.

Yes. Do that. We do that for many meals during our F&W stays. Sometimes that's all we do for a whole day - wander around the World Showcase sampling stuff. That's all we eat, aside from maybe a granola bar for breakfast. It's wonderful.

We made sure each person had their own cards. You can also reload the same card if you need to but that lets everyone stand in their own lines and keeps things moving smoothly. Very handy.

Exactly my thought, I would say a majority of the people do dine at various booths rather than doing a restaurant for a meal. Especially the locals on the weekends. I would love to do it that way, but scrappy does not like to do it that way. She will do maybe one or two booths and thats it, then we will have a TS meal. Thats why we don't really consider us going for the F & W necessarily when we go at that time of the year. I could walk around the WS all day long and munch and drink. She is also a Country music type of person, so none of the eat to the beat music interests her and having a drink before 5pm would shoot her day to crap.

We never made a meal out of the festival, Mostly because while I can snack with the best of them when it's a meal time I want a real full meal. We did use the event to add snacks to the day and even a desert trio to enjoy during illuminations. We also seldom drink there it's such a drain on our bodies in the heat. But for those that look forward to it everything you could want is there.

We intentionally did not book ADRs on the two days we are at Epcot because we plan to graze all day and any alcohol as to be consumed with or after food and later in day or there won't be an evening to remember

While the card is a nice idea (smart actually), we plan to swipe our bands and live with the pain. We really don't use the room charge that much unless it's for gifts, gratuity and alcoholic refreshment.

This will be my first food and wine and we plan to eat and drink around the world. We want to try as many booths as we can in the 2 days we are at Epcot. We have lunches planned elsewhere but dinner will be snacking at all the amazing booths.

I agree with EmFord that doing this on a Thursday won't be too bad.
My personal preference is to avoid F&W after 4pm on the weekends. It gets, crazy.