Let's face it; you are going to visit Busch Gardens in the near future. You might be shuttling kids and out-of-town-visitors around this city's most obvious tourist attraction, indulging your addiction to regulated thrill rides or simply making sure that you get your money's worth out of that year-long pass you thought was a good idea back in February. No matter what the reason, the chance that you'll be passing through those Moroccan-theme gates this summer is about as likely as an afternoon thunderstorm.
Amusement parks, coming as they do from the carnival tradition, aren't known for their culinary peaks. The classic foods that create youthful nostalgia for fair time (popcorn, cotton candy, giant dill pickles) lose their luster when applied to a mass-market corporate setting. The food-conscious among us tend to abandon all hope for a decent meal somewhere between the 40-minute line snaking through blistering Florida heat and the 40-second thrill ride that follows.
However, there are alternatives to sucking down the gummy cheese and ketchup topping grilled bread (they call it "pizza") and syrupy ice cream treats that populate the food stands from here to Fantasyland. Amusement parks now offer a wide variety of dining options — from fancy sit-down feasts to casual outdoor dining that showcases a modern, cuisine-conscious menu. At Busch Gardens, the assortment of eateries presents the average foodie with a dozen good meals outside the range of churros and chicken fingers. The park understands that its adult clients get as hungry as the youngsters, and is clearly dedicated to serving diverse palates. After all, just because you're catering to your inner child doesn't mean you have to attend the juvenile buffet.
A few steps into the park (watch out for the guerilla photographers) brought us to the first of the major eateries, the Zagora Café. Unlike many of the other restaurants in the park, this one is open for breakfast and closes after lunch. The breezy, open-air café has a décor that would make Hemingway proud. Mounted heads of oryx, water buffalo, zebras and even an elephant grace its lofty interior columns. However, I learned that these trophies aren't the result of big game hunting. The park claims the animals on the wall died of natural causes. Our consciences thus eased, we settled beneath the bust of the elephant and dug in. Zagora Café specializes in deli-style lunches, with roasted turkey sandwiches, lunch wraps, tall, gooey cakes and even fruit parfaits. I sampled the chicken fajita platter ($7.29), which contained tasty, well-spiced meat tossed with perfectly grilled green, yellow and red bell peppers and wrapped in a nondescript but inoffensive flour tortilla. The side of fries wasn't anything to write home about, but the large, moist slice of carrot cake made a decadent, delicious and unexpected dessert. I like my carrot cakes chock-full of the texture imparted by a generous hand with carrot shavings, raisins and nuts, and the Busch gardens bakery gets an A+ on that account. The slice also possessed the kind of not-too gooey, not-too sweet cream cheese icing that can make or break a carrot cake. Two thumbs up.
Our next stop was the Desert Grill. This most recent addition to the Busch Gardens bill of fare is actually a politically correct update on the old Festhaus. Like the thankfully discarded slogan, "The Dark Continent," the shady, German-theme Festhaus possessed Joseph Conrad overtones that I'm sure didn't fit with the park's mission statement of family fun. (Though, if you think about it, the Festhaus's theme probably arose more from a connection to both the German origins of Busch beer and the sister-park in Virginia, whose theme is "The Olde Country.") I remember the old restaurant's Oktoberfest floor shows featuring dancers wearing embroidered Bavarian bodices and enough lederhosen to hang themselves with.
Though the restaurant has been given an "Arabian Nights" makeover, little else marks it as typically Saharan. The in-house entertainment has morphed into a generic — if well-executed — song-and-dance routine (every artsy-fartsy high schooler in town knows that the best summer jobs in entertainment are Busch Gardens floor shows), and the menu is still the most diverse in the park. Spaghetti, barbecued ribs, reubens and chicken Caesar salads dot the menu. A remnant of the Olde World old guard lingers in the delicious Hungarian goulash over spatzle ($10.50), and new culinary sensibilities crop up with the equally yummy Cobb salad ($7.50). The Desert Grille take on Cobb includes chickpeas (perhaps a nod to Moroccan cuisine?) and corn along with the usual lettuce, bacon, apple and crumbles of sharp Gorgonzola. And since the restaurant is air-conditioned and as dark as the dinner theater it pretends to be, it serves as a cool, calm and quiet (if you ignore the teenage crooning) respite from the wildness waiting beyond its doors.
However, my favorite Busch Gardens eatery is still the Stanleyville Smokehouse. A classic outdoor picnic barbecue joint, the smokehouse serves top-notch pit-roasted chicken and slow-cooked ribs with fresh rolls, corn on the cob and coleslaw ($9.49 for chicken; $10.49 for ribs; $9.99 for the combo plate). Situated near two water rides and shaded by leafy live oaks, Stanleyville Smokehouse is the place for harried parents to take their messier children. After the meal, they can just send them over to the bridge spanning the Tanganyika Tidal Wave to wash up.
The Smokehouse holds one further claim on my heart — it's merely a hop, skip and a jump away from the Hospitality House. I'm not a fan of the run-of-the-mill pizza and deli sandwiches served at that establishment, but I'm diehard about the free beer. A park perk for the over-21 set, the two allotted samples of free beer served at the Hospitality House save me the trouble of paying the ludicrous $3.49-$4.79 cost for Busch brewed yeast products elsewhere in the park. Heaven.
The final stop on our quest for the top foods in the park was its premiere restaurant, Crown Colony. Though obviously designed as a banquet hall for group functions, Crown Colony is a classy, table-service restaurant capable of making you forget you've spent the day tromping through a theme park and avoiding any breeze you suspect to have passed over the elephant enclosure. Unlike the Desert Grille (nee Festhaus), the Crown Colony has escaped the tide of PC, and still celebrates a bygone era of English supremacy. Cricket bats and polo mallets line the walls beneath old time black-and-white photos and geographically anachronistic maps in pretty wood frames. We sat at a wide veranda overlooking the "Serengeti Plain," listened to soothing live piano music and sampled the enormous, family-style fried chicken dinner ($11.95 per person) with mashed potatoes, coleslaw, cranberry sauce, veggies and gravy. The chicken was moist and tasty, the beer-batter (what else at Busch Gardens?) crisp, crunchy and flavorful. The side items received a more middling grade, though I enjoyed the cranberry sauce and white gravy a bit more than the others. A cup of clam chowder ($3.75) featured large chunks of clam meat and vegetables in a thick broth, and the captain's choice platter of broiled snapper, shrimp and scallops ($16.95, and you can also get it fried) was perfectly decent, but nothing new to a Tampa Bay local. Though we had a pleasant meal and enjoyed an unbeatable view (you haven't had fried chicken until you've had it while watching a giraffe gallop through the sunset), I think the prolonged wait time and slightly higher prices at the sit-down restaurant would probably keep me from returning unless I had a large party to feed. There are equally good meals to be enjoyed at some of the park's other dining establishments.
So pack your sunscreen, walking shoes and change of clothes. You're well-justified in working up an appetite at Busch Gardens, where you can enjoy carnival rides without carnival food and appreciate the beauty of the wild animals without being forced to eat like one.
Freelance writer Diana Peterfreund dines anonymously and the Planet pays for her meals. She may be contacted at diana.peterfreund@weeklyplanet.com. Restaurants are chosen for review at the discretion of the writer, and are not related to advertising.
This article appears in Jul 8-14, 2004.