It’s time to eat!

Mardi Gras!

We are headed to Universal for the 2025 Mardi Gras celebrations to check out the entertainment, merchandise, and, of course, the food! Let’s see what’s actually worth it at this year’s festival!

One of our favorite Universal celebrations is finally underway! The Mardi Gras celebrations are from February 1st through March 30th, 2025 and it will be celebrating Univeral’s 30th Mardi Gras celebration.

Universal Orlando

This year 13 different booths make up the celebrations including Canada, Columbia, Taste of the Quarter, and more! There’s even a new booth this year: India. We got to try a few items to quick off the celebration, starting with the Spicy Szechuan Chicken Bites, which are made with crispy pieces of chicken with white rice, sesame seeds, Szechuan chili crunch and are available at the China booth for $11.99. We’ll warn you now: these babies are HOT and that heat lingers with each bite. But they were DELICIOUS. Just spicy.

Spicy Szechuan Chicken Bites

We also tried the Red Beans and Rice that you can find at the Taste of the Quarter booth for $7.49. These are made with Vegan sausage with stewed beans, white rice and garnished with scallions. Y’all, New Orleans would NEVER. These were just not good and our reporter called them “terrible.” The rice is bland and the beans are hard.

Red Beans and Rice

The Potato Dosa from India is Griddled dosa filled with curried potatoes, onions, black mustard seeds, served with a coconut chutney for $7.99. It’s sort of like a burrito with spicy potatoes. Ours wasn’t wrapped very tightly, so it got messy. The potatoes were okay, but there was nothing that really wowed us about it.

Potato Dosa

We also got a taste of the King Cake that’s available at the Taste of the Quarter booth for $7.49. This is a traditional cake with cinnamon swirl icing, and Mardi Gras sprinkles with a Mardi Gras baby inside (note the baby isn’t edible).

King Cake

Other goodies that you’ll be able to get at the festival include a Pimm’s Cup, made with Pimm’s No 1 Cup and Seagram’s ginger ale garnished with fresh cut orange, strawberry, lemon, and cucumbers. This is available at the French Quarter Sips booth. It’s $16.50 for 20 oz. in a souvenir cup, $13.50 for a refill, and $13.50 for a 12 oz. single serve.

Pimm’s Cup

The Puerto Rico booth has Pinchos de Lechon, which is Char-grilled pork shoulder skewer with guava bbq sauce and pan sobao for $10.99.

Pinchos de Lechon

You can get the Leberkäse at the Germany booth for $10.99. It’s German-style meatloaf served on a pretzel bun with mustard and sauerkraut.

Leberkase

Bites of the Bayou has Baked Cajun Mac & Cheese for $10.99. It’s made with creamy spicy cavatappi pasta with andouille sausage, holy trinity, and a cajun cream sauce, garnished with scallions.

Baked Cajun Mac & Cheese

Of course, you gotta’ have Beignets. You can get those at Taste of the Quarter for $7.49.

Beignets

The Canada booth is serving Hot Maple Lacquered Salmon for $14.99. It’s griddled salmon fillet with a maple lacquer and an ancient grain mixed salad.

Hot Maple Lacquered Salmon

We can’t wait to check out everything these celebrations have to offer! Make sure to stay tuned to DFB for all of your Universal news and updates.

Read everything we know about Universal’s Epic Universe right here

Are you excited for this year’s Mardi Gras? Tell us in the comments!

Disclosure: In nearly all circumstances, Disney Food Blog writers and photographers pay full price for their own travel, hotel, food, beverage, and event tickets. We do this because it’s important to us as journalists to ensure not only that we give you unbiased opinions, but also that you can trust us to do so since we’re paying our own way. On rare occasions, when we are invited by a company to attend a preview as media, and when we choose to accept that invitation, we will always make you, our readers, aware of that situation. Today, we were invited by Universal to attend their media preview of Universal Mardi Gras. Note that when we attend events as media we are 1) Not required to review that event/food on any of our channels, and 2) Not required to review that event/food favorably. You can always count on DFB to give you a 100% unbiased and honest review of any event that we attend, food that we eat, or beverage that we drink. You can see more in our Disclosure Policy. Thank you for reading. — AJ