Ok, let’s talk about the different food-stores, starting with the stalls.
Your basic food stall has one distinctive identifying feature: while it will sell you food, there is no place to sit down to eat the food it just sold you.
Food stalls can be found scattered throughout both of the Parks. Unlike restaurants, however, not all of them show up on the app map (more on this later), so you may want to make note of any that look particularly interesting when you happen to pass them by. These phantom food stalls appeared to appear in the Studios Park than in Disney Park, for some reason.
Food stalls can be high-risk, high-reward.
Food stalls can be quite the double-edged sword when it comes to us neurodivergent folk.
On the one hand, if we happen to catch them at a good time, there can be a short line to get the goods. On the other hand, these food stalls are out in the open, as it were, and that background sensory level of 2-3 is still all around us. It might even be increased by the very fact of waiting in line while being hungry. On the third hand (we have three hands, right?), the lack of a dedicated place to eat could pose a problem, but it also allows us to escape to one of those areas of sanity we talked about earlier, and that could lower our sensory input level more than being in a crowded and noisy dining area.
Know before you go.
One note about food stalls to keep in mind is that they are, by their very nature, small.
Being small, they have one, maybe two, people working there. This can mean that that the time that it takes to get your food can vary quite a bit, depending on staffing and on food availability. Some can be very fast; many can be very slow. It is a bit of a gamble at times, so be aware that just because the line may be shorter at a food stall than at a restaurant, it may not always be the quicker option!
One final thing to be careful about the food stalls is that they might not always be there (see above re: phantom food stalls), as some of them are seasonal. For example, during the Christmas season there are a half dozen or so extra ‘wintery’ food stalls selling delicious (and warm) treats. One way to tell if a particular food stall is temporary or not is to, once again, check out the app map. If a food stall appears on the app map, it is permanent and we can rely on it in our plans!