Epcot Food & Wine Festival - Booth Reviews from 10/26/13

On October 26, I met my Mom up at Epcot for a little Food & Wine craziness.  My standard advice is to avoid attending Food & Wine Festival on weekends if at all possible.  If you must attend, get there as soon as the World Showcase opens (11am, but some booths open a little early) and try to wrap up the Food & Wine portion of your day by 2pm or so.

I got to the park around 10am and my Mom met me about noon.  I did a little exploring on my own and right before 11am, headed over to the World Showcase.  Now, today was also one of the first weekends we had that the weather was comfortable and gorgeous...which meant I was really expecting a lot of crowds.  So I went in with a plan of attack: since I only had one day, I wrote down some of the new things that I wanted to try.  I really didn't want to just go back to my favorites they have every year and be unable to try anything new since I was filled up.  As I did last year, I'll also rate each dish on a scale of 1-5.

Anniversary Trip, Food & Wine Booth Reviews

After our big breakfast, we hopped on the monorail and visited the Magic Kingdom.

Magic Kingdom

Unfortunately New Fantasyland was doing Cast Previews, so Geoff wasn't able to check it out.  We hit all of our favorites, and around 1pm were heading over to Food & Wine to hit up the booths.

Food & Wine Booth Reviews

When I last left off, we had just visited Florida Local.  Our next stop was to another US Tropical State - Hawaii!

Pork Slider - Hawaii

First - for the pork slider.  Geoff took his fork and stole the pineapple on top.  Insert sad face here.  The slider was good, but nothing wowed me about it -- maybe because it would have been better with the pineapple!  Though I forgot to grab a napkin at this both and the pork was juicy enough that I needed it.  I'd give it a solid 3.  Not my favorite item, but it wasn't bad.  Just not that memorable.

Food & Wine Booth Reviews

My whole plan for stopping at Epcot last Thursday was so I wouldn't be tempted to go back again until we were there for our anniversary trip.  That plan failed in spectacular fashion.

On Sunday, Geoff and I headed out for more Food & Wine fun.  The problem with hitting Food & Wine on the weekend is that it gets crowded - fast - with crazy locals like us.

So we were there in time for the booths to open at 11.  This plan worked great - it took a good hour for the World Showcase to start getting crowded, and even by the time we left around 12:30, it wasn't terrible.  But it was HOT!

Beef Skewer - Argentina

Our first stop was Argentina.  Geoff wanted to have the beef skewer with chimichurri sauce.  It was really tasty, the sauce was flavorful and the beef was nice and tender.  It was served on top of a bonito puree.  I'm not sure what bonito is (Wikipedia and Google tell me it's a fish, but it didn't taste anything like fish.)  It tasted like potatoes.  I would give it a 4.

Food & Wine Booth reviews

The Food & Wine Festival at Epcot officially started on Friday.  In years past, they've done previews on Thursday.

I spent the past week in Puerto Rico for work.  On Thursday my flight landed at an awkward time.  If I went straight home, it would be the end of the work day by the time I got home.  Since the weather was nice, I decided to stop by Epcot and see if they were doing the preview again this year.

Lucky me! They were!

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year <3

Celebrating our first anniversary!

I keep forgetting to post this.

A couple weeks ago Geoff and I decided to go ahead an book the hotel for our first anniversary trip!  I won't post the exact dates here as it's a public blog, but we'll be celebrating in the fall.

We love Food and Wine Festival at Epcot.  So when we were discussing what we wanted to do for our anniversary, heading up to Food and Wine Festival came up as the perfect choice.  Yes, we're only an hour away from Disney World, but driving an hour after imbibing at the Festival is kind of frowned upon (and unsafe.)  So in order to fully enjoy it, we're staying on-site.  And yes, for anyone who is wondering, it totally makes me geek out that WDW is a "Staycation" for us...