This year we did a vegetarian tour of the event and found that Horror Nights has the best plant-based items in Universal, period. The fact that they went the extra mile with the theming rather than slapping a beyond petty onto the dish shone through.
We did Pumpkin Guts, the Churro, the skeleton tray, and the cherry pie. We missed the tea sandwich and the bride’s German dumplings.
The guts were overpriced but EASILY the best thing we ate all day at horror nights. Great presentation and wonderful fall flavors. Loved the Pepita crunch. The churro was nice, but could have used more pumpkin spice. The middle felt like unseasoned pumpkin pie filling, which was fine, but didn’t deliver on the caramel flavor.
The TCM booth was very cool, and the flavors were on-point. We both decided that grandmaw needed some more cola slathered on her. Yes, she’s a skeleton, but that doesn’t mean she couldn’t have used a little bit of flavor. The master stroke of this entire event is the leather face pie. It is truly revolting, piping hot, and exactly what you want from this dish. Classic flavors, perfect crust, and very hard to look at. My boyfriend had gone through the wringer and we decided to leave early, but not before seeing the lagoon show and having the pie. That pie sat half-eaten throughout the show because of how truly visceral it is to pierce the face and eat out the bloody pus-filled viscera of the pie interior. A huge win for the test kitchens at Universal, as well as the people running the food stalls for their efforts in playing the food even late in the night.
This year’s food designers really need a raise and need to begin designing new regular menu items for vegetarians and non-vegetarians throughout the resort. I’d love for my boyfriend to experience a no-ham green eggs, or something that isn’t an uninspired beyond burger in Jurassic Park.
We also did Bog Slime, the Heat Wave, Beetle Juice (l’m calling a spade a spade) and Poison Tea. The slime and Heat Wave, to me, had very mild/forgettable flavors, but we really enjoyed both beetle and poison tea. Boyfriend observed that the allspice flavor is reminiscent of the flavor of most poisons, which I think is a stroke of incredible theming and taste. Didn’t ask him how he knew what real poison tasted like, but. I figured out that Ghoul Juice was meant to resemble tiki drinks in the style of the Harry Belafonte songs featured in the film… which was less observant of an observation, but the drink really delivers on that hyper-sweet vacation drink promise.
Overall, a fantastic year for food at Horror Nights, but two notes need to be addressed:
They need more prep staff. They need it badly. The lines are worse than food and wine and they really need to figure out how to make it go faster. Hiring more staff would be the most ethical and smart way to do this.
Earlier I made a post about the souvenir cups, and how refills would be aggressively COVID-unfriendly, and several users said that the refills would be given in a paper cup to avoid saliva from the cup spraying back onto the food handlers. This is incorrect. Each of our refills was placed inside of our plastic blinks cup as expected. While I myself am not surprised or angry about this, it just underlined the security theatre of the entire operation. Efforts to keep team members safe are clearly not worth it in terms of efficiency. If they are going to do refills in this way, there is ZERO excuse for the plexiglass. If there is not going to be real safety measures taken, such as this refillable cup issue, social distancing, etc, then the problematic plexiglass really should be struck. It’s wildly frustrating