Dining at the Garden Grill at EPCOT

Want to dine on a rotating restaurant?  Want to have Disney characters come to your table?  If you answered yes to both, then Garden Grill is for you!

Garden Grill is a table service restaurant located in the Land Pavilion in EPCOT’s Future World.  If you’ve been to Soarin’, you’ve seen Garden Grill as it is located between the escalators up and down to the bottom level to get to Soarin’ and the elevator is just outside the restaurant’s entrance.

Garden Grill is open for dinner only and serves a family style meal with fish, turkey, and beef served with potatoes, vegetables, bread pudding, which is somewhat like stuffing, and topped off with fruit cobbler and vanilla whipped crème.  The children can eat from the family style servings or order their own meal.  The boy had chicken, macaroni and cheese, green beans, and seasoned french fries.  His dessert was a red velvet cake ball covered in chocolate and decorated like a bug.  Garden Grill is in the Land Pavilion after all.

Seating is either tables on the upper level or large booths on the lower level.  We have eaten here twice and had booths on the lower level both times.  While parents may want to sit their children on the inside of the booth, you will be spending your meal going up and down as kids get by you for the character greeting. (We saw this in the booth next to us.)  We sat the boy on the edge of the booth so it was easy for him to meet the characters and get a photo.

We all had plenty of food and great character interaction with Mickey, Pluto, Chip, and Dale.    We got to see some of the characters more than once as they made their way around the restaurant.

Speaking of around, the whole restaurant rotates and you will find yourself looking at various settings throughout your meal.  Most of the them include a peek at the scenes from the Living With The Land attraction just below.  Also know that many of the vegetables and fish from Living With The Land end up in your meal at Garden Grill.

Our service was fast and friendly, except at the end of the meal, and we asked for seconds on all of the entrees and they were delivered in a timely manner.

I would recommend making an Advanced Dining Reservation for Garden Grill as it can fill up fast and waits can be long.

Just a note—we ate at Garden Grill on a day we had been touring another park. . . Magic Kingdom to be exact.  EPCOT and Garden Grill were just a couple of monorail rides away—Magic Kingdom to TTC and then TTC to EPCOT.  I’m not sure if I would have made an ADR for dinner at the Garden Grill had we been touring EPCOT, as its location would have required “back tracking” from World Showcase back to Future World to eat.  I guess if we were planning to leave the park after dinner, then yes, it would work out just fine.  The monorail rides were a great “break” though and we had enough time to get our second wind for EPCOT.