We were lucky enough to be able to visit Disney World during the Epcot Flower and Garden Festival this year. This is an annual festival involving beautiful floral displays, topiaries, food booths and MORE! The dates for the 2018 festival are February 28th-May 28th! So if you’re in the area, you still have time to hit this year’s event!
Epcot’s very own Figment in all his Topiary glory!
This was our first year attending the festival! We had read a lot about the festival and were excited to see what all of the excitement was about. And we were not disappointed! The topiaries and other displays are nothing short of breath-taking (quite literally if you have severe allergies- plan ahead with some allergy medication)!
Walking around the World Showcase, you’ll see many more topiaries! A special topiary is featured at each country. In Italy, you can find Lady and the Tramp. In Norway, there are some trolls. The Outpost between China and German has several Lion King topiaries. Germany has Snow White and her Seven Dwarves!
There’s no shortage of beauty to be seen at the Flower and Garden Festival! If you’re planning a trip around this time, just know that you will want more than one day in Epcot in order to fully enjoy this festival. We spent a week at Disney World during the festival and we probably stopped in to see (and eat) things in Epcot at least 4 days.
Epcot doesn’t just stop with the beautiful flowers! If you’ve been to any other festival at Epcot, you know that it isn’t an Epcot festival without FOOD BOOTHS!
This year, there were 15 booths, plus the Joffrey’s carts had some specialty items as well. Disney provides booklets so you can track your adventures through the Festival. They are pocket sized and have stickers to mark each booth or garden visited. The booklets also included menus for each of the food booths!
We tried multiple items, but not all of them. Most of them were winners in our books, but a couple fell short of what we had hoped.
The Warm Cheese Strudel at the booth in German was something I didn’t eat until the end of our trip. And I found myself really wishing I had tried it earlier so I would know to eat it more than once. The booths open at 11:00 am so I called this a late breakfast, but I’d eat it for every meal, if I could.
This was the Beef Tenderloin Tips from the Canada booth. This is another one I would have eaten multiple times. But there were so many dishes we wanted to try. The meat was tender and tasty and the potatoes were creamy. I wish we had gotten more than 1 carrot, but over all, this was a big winner!
The Sugar Cane Shrimp skewer with Steamed rice and coconut lime sauce was also exceptionally tasty. I believe this had 4 shrimp on the skewer which sat on a healthy sized bed of rice. The plating was fun with the sugar can skewer and the dish was yummy!
It’s hard to go wrong with Cheesecake, but some people manage to do it. HOWEVER, this was not one of those times! This dish was found at the Honey Bee-stro not far from the Canada pavilion. It is made with local wildflower honey and seriously was so delicious and creamy. It was another one we wish we had tried earlier so we could eat it multiple times during this trip.
This was our one food fail for the trip. This Lamp Chop with Quinoa Salad and Blackberry Gastrique from The Berry Basket booth was not great. There was very little meat on the lamb chop and the salad was REALLY bitter! The flavors didn’t balance out and we felt like we had cold Quinoa in our teeth for the rest of the day.
For our first Epcot International Flower and Garden Festival, we’re calling this a win! We can’t wait to see what they do next year! The food was great and the topiaries were so fun. We’re already HUGE fans of Epcot, but this was just the cherry on top for us!
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