Garden Grill
Garden Grill is a table-service, character dining restaurant in The Land pavilion at EPCOT in Walt Disney World. It is a rotating restaurant: the circular dining room turns slowly throughout the meal, carrying diners past scenes from the Living with the Land boat ride below. Meals are served family style as Chip 'n' Dale's Harvest Feast, with visits from Chip, Dale, Mickey Mouse and Pluto. The restaurant space has operated since EPCOT opened in 1982, and took the Garden Grill name in 1993.
History
A rotating restaurant was part of The Land pavilion from its opening on October 1, 1982, an unusually early example of the form — and it remains the only rotating restaurant at Walt Disney World. Its first incarnation was the Good Turn Restaurant, a name that played on the rotation, which served American food for breakfast, lunch and dinner from 1982 to 1986. In 1986 it was renamed the Land Grille Room, which continued in much the same format until 1993.[1]
The current identity dates from 1993, when Nestlé took over sponsorship of The Land from Kraft and the pavilion was renovated. The Land Grille Room became the Garden Grill, the pavilion's food court was rethemed alongside it, and the restaurant adopted the garden-and-harvest theme it keeps today.[2] Character dining and all-you-care-to-enjoy family-style service became its defining format in the years that followed; for a period from 2008 it served dinner only, before breakfast and lunch returned.
Setting
The restaurant occupies the upper level of The Land, arranged as a ring of tiered booth seating around a central core. The whole seating ring rotates at a stately pace — a full revolution takes about an hour — so slowly that the movement is easy to miss until the view has changed. As it turns, the room passes the show scenes of Living with the Land that lie below and beside it: a rainforest, a prairie farmhouse, a thunderstorm and desert scenes, before the circuit brings diners back around. The decor follows a garden-party theme, with trellis work and greenery, and because the booths face outward to the scenes, every table gets the changing view rather than only a privileged few.
Cuisine
Food is served family style, brought to the table in skillets and platters for the table to share, and replenished on request. The lunch and dinner Harvest Feast typically includes a harvest-inspired garden salad, grilled beef with chimichurri, roasted turkey or chicken, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, seasonal vegetables and spoon bread, followed by a fruit-based dessert such as strawberry shortcake. Breakfast follows the same format with eggs, potatoes, bacon or sausage, Mickey-shaped waffles and a cinnamon breakfast loaf.
The menu is tied to the pavilion in an unusually direct way: many of the vegetables served are grown in the greenhouses of Living with the Land, the working agricultural exhibits that guests ride through below the restaurant.[3]
Character dining
The meal is hosted by Chip and Dale, who appear in their role as the pavilion's resident farmers, joined by Mickey Mouse dressed as a farmer in plaid and overalls, and Pluto. The characters circulate around the rotating ring of tables, so each party is visited at their own table for photographs and autographs without leaving their seats or queueing. Because the room turns, a character who has moved on may come back into view on the next circuit — a quirk regulars treat as part of the entertainment. The format, a full table-service meal with guaranteed character time in a comparatively small and calm room, has made Garden Grill one of the most recommended character meals in the park for families with young children.