Universal CityWalk is not a park and does not count as one. It is the district you cross between the parking hubs and the park gates at Universal Orlando Resort, and most visitors pass through it twice a day without looking. A shame, because it solves two specific problems in a trip: arrival evening and departure day.
No park ticket needed
Access to the district is free. Parking still applies if you arrive by car, and it is free late in the evening. For a family landing in Orlando in the late afternoon, this is the obvious outing: eat, walk, get back early, and the first park day starts rested instead of wrecked.
Where to eat
Toothsome Chocolate Emporium & Savory Feast Kitchen plays Victorian steampunk and serves milkshakes children talk about back home. Vivo Italian Kitchen makes fresh pasta. Antojitos Cocina Mexicana works the tortilla on site. The Cowfish Sushi Burger Bar owns its name and mixes both. Bigfire cooks over wood. NBC Sports Grill & Brew keeps the games on its screens. Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. and Hard Rock Cafe have held their addresses a long time. Voodoo Doughnut opens late and does not let up.
What to do after dinner
The district cinema shows current releases. Hollywood Drive-In Golf offers two mini-golf courses built like B-movie posters, and it is the activity that reconciles teenagers with a family evening. Terraces stay open late, and live music plays on certain nights.
The district, from parking to the gates
Universal CityWalk runs between the two parking garages and the entrances to Universal Studios Florida and Universal Islands of Adventure. A footbridge crosses the canal, and that is where the boats serving the resort hotels come through. You cross the district in ten minutes and visit it in three hours.
The mood shifts with the hour. In the morning it is a corridor, crossed with a coffee in hand. In the afternoon the terraces fill with people coming out of the parks to eat somewhere dry. At night the neon takes over and the district becomes a destination of its own, open later than the parks.
Eating without losing the evening
Several places serve at a counter and let you leave in twenty minutes: that is the park-day option, when you are heading back to put children to bed. Full-service tables are better on arrival night or the evening before departure, when nobody has an alarm to set.
The kitchens cover a wide range, from fish to wood-fired barbecue, fresh pasta and Mexican food made in front of you. Allergies and special diets are handled well in most of the resort’s kitchens, and a note at booking is usually enough.
With children, and without
Families find ways to end the day without boarding a ride: doughnuts, ice cream, mini-golf, a cinema. Adults travelling without children find the resort’s only late evenings here, with live music on some nights and terraces open after the parks close.
It is also the rainy-day fallback. Afternoon storms are close to daily in Florida summer, and CityWalk is covered in places, near at hand, and open without a ticket.
Where it fits in the trip
Arrival evening, when three hours are left and not enough for a park. Departure day, when the room is gone and the flight leaves at night. And the middle evening, the one where the family needs to sit down. The resort hotels connect on foot or by boat, which keeps the car and the parking out of it.
Evenings get booked too
The most requested CityWalk addresses fill early, especially on weekends and during school breaks. Our advisors handle those bookings alongside the rest of the trip, and they know which ones suit a group, a stroller or a fussy child.
We book in Canadian dollars with protections that apply here. Planning is free of charge.
Voyages AquaTerra is a U-Preferred Silver partner of Universal Orlando Resort.
Write to createursdemagie@voyagesaquaterra.com, call 450 628-6241, or toll-free 1 866 628-6241.
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