Boma

One of our favorite restaurants at Disney World is Boma, which is located at the Animal Kingdom Lodge. We made it to Boma for the first time a couple of visits ago and we loved how different it was from everything else offered at Disney. We decided to take advantage of having a rental car for the first part of our trip by driving out to Boma for our first dinner on our vacation!

Boma is a buffet serving African dishes from a variety of countries, and from the dishes we saw, it looked like they tried to cover all different parts of the continent. Since there wasn't really a set menu for the night and buffets generally make it hard to write about each individual dish, here's a list of the types of dishes that they serve at Boma, some of which we had.

We have pretty limited notes from our buffet dinner and can only really guess at what some of the other items on the plates were. But one thing we both got at the beginning of our meal was mulligatawny soup. We've only really had this before in Indian restaurants, but the internet tells me this might be on the menu to represent cuisine from Mauritius.

Since we don't really remember exactly what we ate on each plate (and there were some other partial plates from the end of the meal that aren't even here), it probably doesn't make sense to go plate by plate, and talk about the flavor of every single item. We doubt we could, 3 years later, even remember which items were our favorites. We just tried so many different things. So here are A's two plates, with curry and meat and salads and other dishes.

M managed to find a list she kept of some of the stuff from her plates, several of which were also things that A got. As a sampling of what was available on the night we went, the dishes included: tabouleh, chickpea and edamame salad, fufu, couscous with raisins, bobotie, Durban spiced chicken, lamb curry, nut-crusted salmon, lavosh, sundried tomato hummus, black olive hummus, white bean hummus, kokonut rice, zaalouk vegetables, chakalaka stewed tomatoes and onions, shrimp couscous, kool slaai (cole slaw), and Ghana tomato salad.

Some of the dishes we got were obviously African to us (like fufu and bobotie), but we can't really vouch for the authenticity of everything since we're not experts in all different African cuisines. Our goal at Boma was to get a tasty buffet meal with interesting dishes, and we did. What was also a nice surprise is that they brought out a special plate for us with some desserts to celebrate our anniversary. Don't remember now what was on that plate, but we were happy to get it.

We've tried to get out to Boma on every Disney trip since we first discovered it, since it's a nice change-up from eating at the parks. After stuffing ourselves with food, we relaxed a bit in the lobby of the lodge, which is quite beautiful. Worth the drive over from our resort!