Garden Grill in Epcot for an early morning character breakfast

‘I love Garden Grill!’

By the end of our 8am breakfast at Garden Grill Restaurant in Epcot in April, six-year-old Big Girl declared she loved the place. Within the first 20 minutes of sitting down she had met four Disney characters–Chip, Dale, Mickey and Pluto–posed for photos with all of them and received their autographs. There was so much happening that the family even first failed to notice the entire restaurant was moving.

Garden Grill is located in the Land Pavilion in Epcot, where the popular Soarin’ ride is, and it is a revolving restaurant. It meant the background in our photos kept changing from green to the open atrium in the pavilion and the slow movement soon added to the children’s excitement.

We had expected the staff to struggle to find our table since the position kept changing, but they had nor problems, and our waitress Kim impressed us with friendly and welcoming service. She offered to take a family photo for us too, and she was back several times to ask if we needed any refills or extras – both for food and drinks.

Garden Grill is one of the Walt Disney World character breakfasts with food served family-style, and although I had heard lots of positives about this set up before trying it with our own family, I was still pleasantly surprised at how well it worked. The kids usually love buffet breakfasts, but when going to a character meal it can get hectic and the challenge with buffets is to make sure everyone in the family is at the table when the character arrives.

When food is served at the table family-style, I think it can make for a relaxing character meal experience since there is no need to leave the table and the selection of food served at Garden Grill was spot on for both children and adults alike. We had a bowl of fruit, a huge cinnamon bun, scrambled eggs, Mickey waffles, hash browns, bacon and sausages.

We were on the dining plan, and in addition to juices and coffee and tea, this meant we had a Mimosa included in the breakfast. Both food and drinks were among the best we had during our Disney week and I agree with what I had read before coming- Garden Grill is a great choice for a character meal.

The food was good, the service was friendly, the restaurant is smaller than many other venues (which meant the characters had time to visit us twice in the hour we were there), and the location was ideal for riding Soarin’ without a FastPass reservation since we had started our breakfast at 8am and finished before the ride opened at 9am. This is one 8am breakfast we would consider booking again on our next holiday.

Tags: Breakfast, Disney, Epcot, Family travel, Garden Grill, Mickey, Orlando, Walt Disney World