Ok, so here is my very Type A process. I have an excel spreadsheet. I go through and I look at all the menus. And I set up a data table of all the ones I think we’ll be interested in. I know my family well enough to anticipate what most of them will order. And when in doubt I’ll choose the more expensive option. So I have restaurants down the rows, my family members in the columns and I plug in the price of the meals I expect them to order and then I autosum the rows to get an estimated price for that restaurant. We generally tend to do ADRs for dinner because by then we are tired and need a longer break. So again, I set up the date,park,lunch, dinner, price columns. And I start plugging in. I try to pair heavier sit down TS restaurants with a lighter/smaller lunch. Or make sure we aren’t doing hamburgers/chicken strips/hot dogs for both meals in a day. Once I have all that planned out, and I know approximately how much the meals will be, I add 10% to cover taxes and tips (we eat at more QS than TS so it evens out to 15-20% for tips) and then I add another $100-200 for snacks for the whole trip. Example, We are going over Labor Day week, 7 days in the park, 5 TS meals, 4 people, only 1 who still eats off the kids menu and my food budget is $1500. And that’s actually pretty high for us, but we are doing some more expensive meals this trip. I also generally have at least one back up plan QS for each park just in case we aren’t feeling what I originally had down, it’s really crowded, or even closed. But I’ve been within $50 of my budget my last 4 trips. We eat what we want and don’t feel like we are denying ourselves anything. But we also don’t spend a lot on extras like pop, desserts, or more than 1 snack per person a day. We eat breakfast in the room, and carry some small snacks for long lines. We bring our own water ect.
And yeah, we plan rides around the restaurants. We utilize mobile ordering and have it set up so that after we get off one ride, we check in as we head over, eat, and then do rides in that area of the park.