We pick back up with the EPCOT Festival of the Arts food tour around 7pm after a few hours of R&R back at the Port Orleans French Quarter. We had a 8:20 Lightning Lane return time for Remy and it just wouldn’t feel right to go to the little Chef’s adventure on an empty stomach. I had my eye on a couple Festival offerings to help ensure that didn’t happen.
We stopped first at the Gourmet Landscape booth for an old favorite and a dish brand new for this years festival. Both of these dishes were plant based which we were thankful for after a lot of meat based dishes earlier in the day. We ordered both the “Citrus-braised Beet Tartare with golden beet “egg yolk,” mustard vinaigrette, pickled mustard seeds, pickled mushrooms, spiced pistachios, and “feta” snow” for $5.50 and the “Wild Mushroom Risotto with aged parmesan, truffle shavings, and zinfandel reduction” for $9.75. The risotto has been a staple at the Festival for the last 3 years and notably has not increased in price since we first had it in 2023. I guess inflation really is cooling!
While the price hasn’t increased. This one isn’t going to win any value awards at nearly $10 for rice. That said, this was well executed and did include truffles which are notoriously expensive ingredients. It was very mushroom forward as one might expect, so only order these if you’re a mushroom fan. If you are and appreciate truffle and risotto I think this is worth the price. It’s been a favorite of ours for the past 3 festivals despite the high price tag.
At the other end of the cost spectrum is the Beet Tartare dish coming in at only $5.50. This dish is on the Wonderful Walk of Colorful Cuisine, so make sure to get your stamp if you choose to partake. Similar to the mushroom risotto, this dish is extremely reliant on flavor from the one ingredient – the beets. If you like beets this is going to be a winner, if you don’t then why are you ordering something called beet tartare anyway? I happen to like beets and my wife loves beets. We both really enjoyed this dish and appreciated the opportunity to eat more vegetables in such a delicious presentation. Highly recommend this one to the beet lovers in the house.
Momentarily satisfied we continued through the Canadian pavilion towards France. We stopped to listen to live music at the stage along the promenade in Canada. An Irish band was playing and that’s enough to make me stop and pay attention. They were pretty good and most of the seating was filled despite the cold temps. I appreciate this kind of “throw in” entertainment around EPCOT during these festivals. It really adds to the atmosphere and helps to keep the energy up after your 12th dish of the festival.
As we walked through the UK pavilion I couldn’t help but notice that the Yorkshire Fish and Chips stand had no one in line. It felt like the proverbial parting of the seas just for me so I had to stop.
Bad picture aside, this was a phenomenal piece of fish. The batter was crispy and did a great job of protecting the fish from the fryer oil, leaving the fish juicy but not greasy. The serving size is very good for the $13.49 price tag – it’s not uncommon to see Fish and Chips at $25-30 at table service restaurants – we shared 1 order and were very full by the end. There is seating around the side and kind of behind the shop. It fills up quick during the day or during better weather, but on this cold evening there was no one there.
The air temperature was so cold that the fountains were steaming.
This marked the end of our festival experience for Day 1. We’ll pick right up with Day 2 as this was a much shorter day for us. The weather was worse with a steady mist to light rain throughout the day. It made the prospect of eating outside less than appealing for most of the day.
We ate lunch at the resort before we left with the idea of sampling a few dessert options when we got to the park. We started with the “Deconstructed Key Lime Pie: Flexible Key lime curd, “Key lime” mousse, graham cracker cake, and meringues” from the Deconstructed Dish booth by Test Track. This is another returning item that we very much enjoyed during previous festivals. Coming in at $6.50 it’s not too bad on the value front either.
Everything on this dish was very good but ironically I found myself putting the dish back together with each bite. I’d have preferred an assembled key lime pie with these ingredients but this was very good yet again. If you don’t like key lime pie then skip this, if you do, give it a shot.
Next we headed towards Deco Delights to try the “Almond Frangipane Cake layered with raspberry jam and Belgian chocolate”, another item on the Wonderful Walk of Colorful Cuisine. With better planning we would have ended here since this is also where you pick up your reward for completing the walk. Not a big deal though as you can just walk up to the pickup window with your completed booklet at any time.
This cake looked beautiful. The layers were very pronounced and reminded me of colorful legos in the best way possible. If you look closer however, you may see indications of why this ended up being the most disappointing and objectively worst item we had at the festival. If you look at the second layer from the top, the ivory colored one, you can see how dense this cake was. I like my cake to be light and fluffy and this was anything but. The flavor was good and had the cake been more cakey everything would have worked together nicely. As it stood though, the density of the cake made it completely overpower the chocolate and jam components. Maybe try to scope this item out on someone else’s plate or maybe sneak a bite with your pocket fork when no one is looking. If the cake is fluffier it’s worth a shot at just $5, but if it’s anything like ours any price is too much.
Later in the day we would go to what would end up being our last festival booth of the season. Needing a final stamp to complete our colorful walk, we headed to Tangierine Cafe: Flavors of Medina in Morocco. This festival booth is located inside a pavilion building where Tanierine cafe used to be located. We ordered three items from this menu, “Grilled Kebabs with carrot-chickpea salad and garlic aïoli ” – choosing the chicken option over the lamb, “Stone-baked Moroccan Bread with assorted dips”, and “Avocado-Coconut Custard Tart with pomegranate cream and henna-inspired gelée Veil”. Priced at $6.25, $5.25, and $5.25 respectively, these are some of the cheaper food options at the festival. Here’s a photo of what around $17 gets you from this booth:
We found every one of these dishes to be exceptional. If you’ve had this kind of food before you know the spices are rather unique compared to most cuisines and I think this generally helped each dish out in the overall scheme of things. We had been eating more traditional (for us) spices over the course of the festival which made these flavors pop even more.
The chicken kebab was made with thigh, which I know can be a turn off for some, but the thigh wasn’t overly fatty or greasy. Just keep that in mind if you’re not a thigh person though. The carrot-chickpea salad brought some acidity to dish to balance out the aioli and chicken thigh. Really tasty – I could have eaten a couple of these. Not the best value at $6.25 for one skewer, but the flavor is there and if they offered two at that price they’d have a line out the door.
The bread dish benefitted greatly from the sauces. One was a Zhoug sauce – essentially a cilantro based chimichurri, the other was was what I believe was a Zalouk – an eggplant and tomato based sauce similar to a tapenade, and the third was hummus. Each was delicious in it’s own right but we both thought the Zhoug was the best.
The surprising winner of this trio was the Avocado-Coconut Tart. The richness of the avocado worked very well with other more sweet components in the dish. The gelée Veil was an interesting touch to elevate the dish just enough so that it fit right in for the Festival of the Arts. Though this was a dessert, I could see a few tweaks to the flavor profile making it easily fit as an appetizer as well. Just a really unique and well executed dish.
I almost forgot! The culmination of our wonderful walk of colorful cuisine. On the way out of the park we swung by Deco Delights to collect our bounty. A Figment rice crispy treat!
Nothing too spectacular, but a fun little scavenger hunt if you’re going to try several dishes on the list anyway.
Final Thoughts
Overall, the weather did slightly dampen our festival experience. There were a number of booths that we didn’t get to visit and with better weather we definitely would have. It’s entirely possible we missed the best dishes of the festival, but the booths we missed were mostly the popular but middling ones each year – China, Italy, Japan. Popular cuisines run by third parties who cater to the masses. I do wish I tried the sushi donut from Japan, I’ve read good things about the soft shell crab slider over at Opening Bites by Communicore plaza, and the new Fictional Victuals booth had some interesting offerings. I’d have liked to swing by those, but maybe next year!
Of the dishes we did try the top 3 were:
- Avocado-Coconut Tart from Tangierine Cafe: Flavors of Medina in Morocco
- Red Wine-braised Beef Short Rib with parsnip purée from Pastoral Palate in Germany
- Chorizo and Potato Empanada with turmeric aïoli and annatto aïoli from Vibrante & Vivido
the bottom 3 were, with the worst being number 1:
- Almond Frangipane Cake from Deco Delights
- “Deviled” Egg Trio from The Artist’s Table
- Croqueta from El Artista Hambriento
The Croqueta wasn’t bad and probably doesn’t deserve to be on this list. It was just overpriced for what you got. Something had to be #3 and keep the symmetry in tact.
The Festival of the Arts continues to impress while staying EPCOTs forgotten festival. The food booths routinely put out inspired dishes and while not all are hits I applaud the efforts to try new things year after year. With weather cooperating it’s easy to spend two full days in EPCOT wandering around the Festival eating, drinking, taking in all the art installations, and listening to the Disney on Broadway series. If travel this time of year is in the cards for you I highly recommend a trip to experience this great event.
