I had the same thoughts. And any complaints I've had seem to have little or nothing to do with anything the executive chef would decide but are clearly financial. Whoever the executive chef is will almost certainly deal with constraints that a self-respecting chef doesn't want. The company knows how many passholders KI has and how many have dining plans and how much they use it. I was at CGA recently and was shocked at what they charge for the dining plan there: $99 and I don't think they charge tax or processing fees either. I guess they at least realize they can charge more at KI but its still too cheap when you have an army of people who show up 30 or 40 or 50 times or more a year.

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For us, last year we were blown away by Cookes of Dublin. We simply had the cheeseburgers and it was an instant favorite. We had some other high quality meals throughout our time in Orlando (including some excellent pizza from Epic Universe), but something about those Dublin cheeseburgers… we still talk about it. I hope we can scrounge up money to go back to Florida again some day!

Hence why they stand out, at least to us. 

I think the problem with food is that they, as a chain, are trying to do two things, which are diametrically opposed:  Act like their food is "elevated", "fancy", etc to try to get people to pay out of pocket for it Continue selling hugely underpriced dining plans because (as Disenchanted Parks is finding out) passholders will not pay out of pocket for food after having dining plans for 11 years, and raising the prices will only get the people they actually make money off of to stop buying them The thing is that a lot of the issues with food don't have anything to do with the chef or even really the park, it's corporate budget cuts due to the failure of the merger. Even the worst chef would admit that, say, selling a $20 burger that doesn't come with any toppings is an obvious fail, but the parks do it because it saves a little bit of money.