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Today, I want to talk about the Jamaica booth at the Busch Gardens Food & Wine Festival in Williamsburg, Virginia.
The Busch Gardens Food and Wine Festival is such a wonderful event that my family likes to go to Williamsburg every year in the spring or early summer. What I love about the festival is that it is such a great way to try new foods and drinks. They have different booths across the park set up for different cuisines. You can check out the full list of booths and more about the festival itself in our Food & Wine Festival Guide.
But once again, today I want to focus on the Jamaica booth.
I do not eat Jamaican food very often, so this was a great opportunity to try new dishes. So I want to tell you about what they have to offer, including how much the menu items cost. Then I’ll review a few of the food and drink options, rating them from must-have, to good, to skip.
Foods
There’s a lot to like food-wise on this menu:
- Jamaican Patty (Spicy beef with a pastry crust & coconut jerk dip on the side): $9
- Jerk Chicken Slider (Comes with a side of mango salsa with cilantro lime slaw): $7.50
- Caribbean Shrimp Salad (Salad with shrimp, jicama, heart of palm, coconut, pineapple & topped with Key Lime Vinaigrette): $8
- Toto Rum Cake (Coconut cake and rum sauce): $7.25
Drinks
There are lots of drinks available at this stand.
- Wine: $11.99
- Joao Portugal Ramos Loureiro Vinho Verde
- Cote Mas Cremant de Limoux Rose Brut
- Beer: $15.99
- Caiseal Beer & Spirits Co. Red Ale
- New Realm Brewing Co. Limeade Lager
- Three Notch’d Brewing Passion Fruit Gose
- Frozen Cocktail: $14.99
- Jamaican Me Smile
- Cocktail: $13.99
- Dark & Stormy
- Non-alcoholic refresher: $6
- Ginger Limeade
Must-Have Menu Item
The menu item we don’t think you should leave the park without trying is the Toto Rum Cake.
Before we tried this at the Food & Wine Festival last year, Rum cake is a dessert we had been wanting to try for quite awhile. And now we are so glad we tried it. It was so delicious! Everyone in my family loved it, even a family member who doesn’t particularly like sweets. It was just really delicious. A wonderful mix of flavors.
Good, But Not The Best Menu Item
We were a bit mixed on the Caribbean Shrimp Salad.
Here’s what we liked about the Caribbean Shrimp Salad:
- The presentation is gorgeous. It is a beautiful salad.
- There were a lot of shrimp in the salad. Usually, at festivals like this, when they include more expensive food like seafood, there are only a couple of pieces of shrimps. But there was plenty of shrimp in this salad.
- The pineapple bits were really good.
- Most of the bites were really good.
Here’s what we didn’t like about the Caribbean Shrimp Salad:
- There were onions in the salad, which we did not expect. For most of my family, that was fine. But I don’t like onions, so that hurt my enjoyment of the salad.
- I couldn’t really taste the coconut. It got a bit overshadowed by the rest of the salad.
- A few pieces left a slightly unpleasant aftertaste. You can wash that down with a drink or a bite of something else (such as the Toto Rum Cake). But still, I thought I should mention it.
Probably Skip Menu Item
Now, obviously, a lot of this comes down to personal taste. But I can’t say anyone in my family particularly liked the Ginger Limeade.
I’m not sure why, but this drink didn’t really work for me. I don’t know if the ingredients could have been mixed better or if it was perhaps a bit too sweet. Or maybe it was just a combination of tastes I wasn’t used to. But I didn’t really like it and it had a strong aftertaste.
Though having said this, it was also kind of weirdly addictive and I kept drinking it. But, it was definitely not the best drink you can get at the festival.
Busch Gardens Food & Wine Festival Discount Tickets
Regardless of which menu items you want and don’t want to try, you will want to try attending the festival. And to do so, you will need a ticket to Busch Gardens.
Luckily, there are great ways to save money on Busch Gardens Williamsburg tickets. You can find out how to get discount tickets to Busch Gardens & learn more about the theme park in our Busch Gardens guide.