FULL BREAKFAST REVIEW: Flora Taverna at Helios Grand Hotel at Epic Universe

There is SO much to do, see, and EAT at Universal Orlando’s brand-new Epic Universe theme park.

There are five different lands at this new park, along with an in-park hotel, the Helios Grand. And now, we’re back at Flora Taverna at this new hotel to see what they’re serving up for breakfast!

Background

Serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Flora Taverna offers a full breakfast buffet and Mediterranean comfort foods. Whether dining indoors or al fresco, guests have amazing views of Universal Epic Universe.

Here’s what you need to know about dining at this restaurant.

Atmosphere

Flora Taverna is light and airy with blue accents and florals, making this place live up to its name. The restaurant is open daily for all three meals:

BREAKFAST: 7 AM to 11 AM
LUNCH: 11:30 AM to 2 PM
DINNER: 5 PM to 10 PM

The decor inside the restaurant is beautiful, and there’s plenty of both indoor and outdoor seating. You really feel like you’ve been transported to the Mediterranean when you’re dining here. The large, open kitchen makes for great entertainment if you can get a seat nearby.

There is a buffet available here — Sunrise Buffet ($36) — which includes artisanal pastries, made-to-order omelets, pancakes, fruit salads, charcuterie, scrambled eggs, bacon, and roasted vegetables. The buffet also includes your drink — coffee, tea, and juice.

But enough about that, what are we eating?!

Food & Drinks

We kicked things off with the Shawarma Spiced Beef Hash for $29. This comes with a poached cage-free egg, locally grown tomato, charred onion, roasted potatoes, and zhug sauce.

This is Flora Taverna’s specialty breakfast. It’s the only thing offered in that category on this menu, and it is definitely the standout here. We are so glad that we ordered it — it includes a poached egg, which was poached perfectly. It had that runny yolk that you look for when you cut into it, it had tomato, which they say is locally grown, and some charred onion, and then roasted potatoes.

The beef was very tender, tasted like tenderloin, cut up, you know, into chunks. The shawarma spices were warm and comforting. This tastes like a comfort food breakfast in a lot of ways. This is definitely something that we would order again, and would maybe even come here for breakfast specifically for this dish. The roasted potatoes were delicious. They were different than our hash brown potatoes that we got on our Helios Grand breakfast, so they are more like a baby potato. The beef was tender. It was pretty well done, which is typical whenever you know your steak is cut up into smaller pieces like that, but not overcooked in any way.

The Baklava French Toast was our pick for something sweet, and at $25, this comes with crushed pistachios and dried roses.

This was so interesting and different! It’s a French toast made with sliced baklava and has crushed pistachios on top with a bit of syrup. This was not overly sweet French toast — it was not dripping in maple syrup or coated in powdered sugar, but was still very moist. The crushed pistachios on top were very finely crushed pistachios, which added a lot. If you like a sweet breakfast, you will like this, and like we said, it was not super sweet. It came with 3 triangles of the baklava French toast, so again, a pretty reasonable serving or something to share.

We also tried the Helios Grand Breakfast for $27. This is two cage-free eggs prepared to your liking, with artisanal toast, your choice of applewood smoked bacon, country pork sausage, or apple chicken sausage, and your choice of breakfast potatoes or seasonal fruit.

This was your traditional American breakfast with two eggs cooked the way you want, toast, breakfast meat of your choice, and then a breakfast potato or seasonal fruit. We went with the potatoes here. They were the small kind of diced hash browns with bell peppers, red and green bell peppers cooked with them, and they were pretty good. We did appreciate that the bell peppers are chunky in this, so if you don’t like bell peppers or they don’t agree with you, they’re easy to pick out.

The eggs are cage-free eggs, and we ordered ours over medium. They were cooked to order and seasoned well, but they were just plain ol’ eggs. We chose the apple chicken sausage here. We liked this sausage, but feel like there needs to be a caveat. We are accustomed to eating chicken apple sausage that you get at a supermarket, and it is pretty sweet and pretty mildly flavored. This sausage is very meaty and very heartily flavored.

It is very savory, and if you like sausage, you will like this a lot. If you do not like sausage or you only want that kind of sweet flavor, you would probably be better off to go with the bacon on this plate.

Magic or Tragic?

This was a definite MAGIC for us, yet again. We recently had lunch here and loved our meal, and this breakfast was no different.

Overall, we felt like the prices for breakfast entrees were a bit high — a couple of dollars off each of them would make them more fairly priced for what we got. Portions were not huge but also not tiny. We felt like they were the right size.

In the meantime, we’ll be on the lookout for more restaurant updates from Epic Universe, Universal Orlando Resort, and beyond. Make sure you stay tuned to AllEars for the latest theme park news and more!