It took four years of being an annual pass holder, but I was finally able to cross SeaWorld’s All-Day-Dining off my bucket list! For one flat rate, you can eat a full meal as often as once per hour with a side or a dessert and a drink. Generally speaking, if you eat twice it will more than pay for itself. If you go intending to spend your day feasting you are going to have an amazing time.
We arrived around eleven, which was later than I wanted to arrive but sometimes it’s hard to get moving early when you closed the night before. We had to stop by the kiosk just inside the park to swap out our printed vouchers for the wristbands and that took about ten minutes. Then we made a quick detour to take a picture with a Shark posing at the front of the park. We had already missed the continental breakfast as Seafire Grill had already switched to lunch, so we journeyed further in to Voyager’s Smokehouse. It’s the restaurant beside my favorite show, Pets Ahoy! We spent a little more time than I am willing to admit staring at the explanation of how precisely the dining deal worked. I love and adore SeaWorld, but their employees aren’t always the most helpful so I don’t like asking them questions if I can avoid it. Eventually we figured it out. You get one entrée, marked with a red dot, and the choice of a side or dessert, marked with a blue dot, and then one fountain drink. At Voyager’s Smokehouse there are a couple entrees that are excluded with no dot at all, but this isn’t the case most places. You can basically have anything you want but the ribs and chicken combo, so Jay got the ribs and I got the quarter chicken. Each entrée came with a side of its own side already, and then we added two salads for “side” option. (It was too early for dessert and lots of sugar.) Then we got two fountain drinks. The total on the register was about $38, but it changed to $0 when they scanned the wristbands. I checked my watch, it was 11:20 so we could eat again at 12:20. So we rode Mako and went to watch the dolphin show.
My favorite restaurant in the park is the Expedition Café across from Antarctica. They have three different counters each with a different cuisine: American, Asian, or Italian. We headed straight for the Italian. I got the pasta and sauce, and Jay got some sort of thing with cheese that the woman serving the food recommended. He picked the carrot cake for dessert, and I got the vanilla cheesecake. The food is served inside and you take your trays outside to pay.
There’s seating areas outside, but what most people don’t realize is there’s actually an indoor seating area. It’s empty almost every single time I go. People mistake the doors for being just part of theming and they don’t realize they actually open. Makes for nice, quiet, air-conditioned dining.
We were still full from the first meal so we didn’t quite finish all of it. I opted to leave part of the pasta uneaten to polish off the cheesecake. We threw our leftovers in the trash and headed out, to lots of confused stares from tourists eating in the blinding sun. We started to make our way towards the whales, except I got distracted by the meet and greet with Puck, the penguin from the Antarctica ride.
We went to the orca underwater viewing, but there weren’t any whales. There are seven pools and six whales, and they can come and go as they please. So sometimes you see them, sometimes you don’t. Instead, we headed over to Wild Artic to see the beluga whales, seals and walruses until it was time for more food. Mama’s Pretzel Kitchen is just outside Shamu Stadium, and it’s usually my favorite snack place. Snacks, however, don’t work on the All Day Dining Plan, it’s one of the limitations. So the only thing we could get was one of the fancier pretzel meals: a pretzel dog, or one with pepperoni and bacon. They’re served with chips and you still get dessert. Jay passed but I got the chocolate cake, determined to get as much out of the dining plan as I could. When we tried to redeem it the bracelets weren’t working and they said it was too soon since we last ate. I pulled out the receipt for our last meal and proved it had been over an hour, so a supervisor overrode the error and approved it. The Pretzel Kitchen doesn’t have indoor or really even shaded seating, so we wandered over to the ice cream place and found a table in there. I vastly overestimated my stomach’s tolerance for more food, and wound up making the day of a family next to us when I asked the mom if I could give her daughters my cake. I finished about half the pretzel, and we went to see Pets Ahoy! After the show we went to the sea lion exhibit until it was time for more food.
I learned my lesson the last time, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to keep getting free food. We went to the Spice Mill and opted for just desserts and drinks this time. Jay got a cup full of strawberries and I finally tried the chocolate cake. I was a little sad it wasn’t as good as the cheesecake, but it was a nice breather in a mostly empty indoor restaurant. It was a little after five at this point in the day, and the park closed at seven so we laid our plans for what else we wanted to see. We headed to the manatee pools, and spent quite a bit of time there. I’ve always been disappointed they changed the underwater viewing into a queue for Turtle Trek, so we waited in the queue to see the animals and then exited before the show. We went by the dolphin underwater viewing, where I caught a Pokémon that looked like an octopus in the tank! We started the long walk to the other side of the park back to Shamu Stadium to grab a seat. The stadium was almost empty, so we wandered around the giftshops until it was closer to show time.
Our final stop of the night was the Seafire Grill for two vanilla cheesecakes with strawberries, bringing our total for the day to three complete meals, two desserts, and five fountain drinks each and feeling so full we could burst.
Cost: $37 each with tax. We got ours buy one, get one free on “Blue Friday”, SeaWorld’s version of Black Friday.
Duration: All day.
Value: Totally worth it if you’re spending a full day at the park. Look forward to doing it again sometime. If you eat twice, it more than pays for itself.
Add On Options: Souvenir cup for $6.99 with unlimited free refills.
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