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'''Coral Reef Restaurant''' is a table-service seafood restaurant in [[The Seas with Nemo & Friends]] pavilion at [[EPCOT]] in [[Walt Disney World]]. It is defined by a single architectural idea: one wall of the dining room is a run of thick acrylic panels looking directly into the pavilion's main saltwater aquarium, so guests eat while sharks, rays, sea turtles and schools of reef fish move past on the other side of the glass. The restaurant opened with its pavilion on January 15, 1986, and has traded continuously as a table-service location ever since, making it one of the longest-serving restaurants at EPCOT.<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Reef_Restaurant</ref>

== History ==
Coral Reef was not part of EPCOT Center on opening day in 1982. The ocean pavilion it belongs to had been planned from the park's early years but arrived as a second-wave addition, opening as The Living Seas on January 15, 1986, sponsored by United Technologies. The pavilion was built around a single enormous tank presented at the time as the largest saltwater aquarium in the world, and the restaurant was part of the opening-day offer within it, extending the pavilion's underwater-research conceit — guests arrived as visitors to a facility called Sea Base Alpha — into a full meal.<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seas_with_Nemo_&_Friends</ref>

The restaurant kept its name and its basic format through the pavilion's later transformations. The Living Seas lost its sponsor in the late 1990s and was gradually reworked around Pixar's ''Finding Nemo'', reopening as [[The Seas with Nemo & Friends]] in the mid-2000s, with the ride, Turtle Talk with Crush and the observation areas all reframed around the film. Coral Reef needed no reframing: a dining room beside a living reef fitted the new identity as readily as the old one, and it simply carried on serving beside the same tank.

== Setting ==
The dining room is arranged in tiers, so that tables set back from the glass are raised above those in front and most seats keep a sightline to the water. The viewing panels are about eight inches thick and form one continuous side of the room; beyond them is the pavilion's main habitat, holding 5.7 million US gallons of saltwater.<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seas_with_Nemo_&_Friends</ref> The tank supports a large and varied population — Disney has described more than 2,000 animals across dozens of species — and the regular cast visible from a table includes reef sharks, stingrays, sea turtles, groupers and dense schools of smaller fish. Divers working in the tank, whether feeding animals, maintaining the habitat or taking part in guest dive programmes, are also a common sight.

Away from the glass the room leans into its subject gently rather than theatrically: deep blue and teal tones, wave-like curves and subdued lighting that keeps attention on the brightly lit tank. Because the aquarium is the entertainment, the room tends to be calmer than many EPCOT dining rooms, and window-adjacent tables are among the most requested seats in the park.

== Cuisine ==
The menu is built around seafood, in keeping with the room. Expect preparations of fish and shellfish as the centre of the offer — dishes in the Florida coastal idiom such as grilled or seared fish, shrimp and scallops — alongside a smaller set of alternatives including steak and chicken for mixed parties, and plant-based options. WDWMAGIC's long-running listing has consistently summarised the restaurant in the same terms: fresh fish and shellfish served beside the tank, for lunch and dinner.<ref>https://www.wdwmagic.com/dining/coral-reef-restaurant.htm</ref> Desserts have often continued the marine joke, most famously a chocolate dessert shaped and finished to suggest ocean waves.

In practice the food is widely understood to be the supporting act. Coral Reef's reputation, and its booking demand, rest on the view: it remains one of the very few restaurants anywhere where a full table-service meal is eaten a few feet from sharks in a working aquarium of this scale.

== See also ==
* [[The Seas with Nemo & Friends]]
* [[EPCOT]]
* [[Walt Disney World]]

== References ==
<references />

[[Category:Restaurants]]
[[Category:EPCOT]]
[[Category:1986 establishments in Florida]]

Coral Reef Restaurant - Revision history

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