Don’t make these mistakes!
The EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival is one of our favorite Disney World events of the year. The 2024 edition of the “culinary adventure across 6 different continents” is scheduled to run from August 29th to November 23rd, and we can’t wait. That said, there are some mistakes from our past we’re looking to avoid this time around.
Not Have a Plan…or a Budget
While it can be tempting to head into the Food & Wine Festival sight unseen, we wouldn’t recommend it. You don’t have to preselect all your meals, but definitely take a look over the menus and map beforehand. That way you know where you want to go, what foods you want to try, and most importantly a good idea of how much you’re going to spend during a day at the festival.
We go to each festival on its opening day and you know we’ll be there on August 29th trying it ALL. Stay tuned to AllEars.net, the AllEars YouTube channel, and follow along with us through live stories on Instagram on the day. We’ll tell you the pros and cons of everything to help you decide!
Wait Until the Afternoon to Start Eating
It can be tempting to try to spend the morning experiencing rides and attractions before starting to think about food during lunch or dinner hours. However, this can lead to a couple of issues. First off, the lines are at their longest during afternoon to early evening hours. Secondly, booths may run out of some of their more popular items by the latter portion of the day. We’d definitely recommend starting off as early as possible, especially if there’s a specific item you really want to try.
Trying to Eat as a Group from Different Booths
We completely understand the desire to eat together as a group. However, from our experience, it doesn’t work all that well if different members of your party want items from different booths. Between the physical distance between them and the potential difference in wait times, it’s inevitable that someone’s food will be ready first, and will get cold and/or melt if they decide to wait for the rest of their party to return.
Making a Dinner Reservation
While EPCOT probably does have the best in-park restaurant selection of any of Disney World’s parks, we would still advise skipping a dinner reservation on a festival day. While most of the festival’s dishes appear small in a vacuum, they add up quickly, meaning you’ll likely be full by the time your reservation arrives. On the other hand, if you purposely don’t indulge in festival food in order to “save room” for dinner, you’ll be missing out on limited-time festival offerings.
The EPCOT Food & Wine Festival is one of our favorite events of the year, but there are definitely certain mistakes to avoid in order to maximize a day at EPCOT’s premier festival. Stay tuned to AllEars for further Food & Wine updates.
Disney CONFIRMS 6 More EPCOT Food & Wine Festival Booths
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What’s the one mistake you avoid when visiting the Food & Wine Festival? Let us know in the comments below.
We went to the Flower and Garden Festival this past March. We decided we would not make a dining reservation for dinner and would eat at a few of the kiosk offerings instead. Except the shortest line was at least 30 minutes long (and there is no one telling you with a sign on a pole how long the wait is). We decided to stand in line and to sample one offering and then threw in the towel on the plan to have dinner around the world type of thing as we would have spent half our time waiting in line to eat. Since we did not have a dining reservation, we wound up eating at the Connections Cafe instead. We had never experienced that in the past at either Festival. I have no reason to think the Food and Wine Festival will be any different. So very sad.