BaseLine Tap House
BaseLine Tap House is a bar and lounge on Grand Avenue at Disney's Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World. Styled as a cheerful California corner pub, it specialises in craft beer and wine from California, served with a short menu of small plates. It opened with the Grand Avenue area on September 29, 2017.[1]
History
BaseLine Tap House was created as part of a reworking of the last surviving section of the park's Streets of America. Most of that area had been demolished for Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, and the remaining New York-street façades were reimagined in 2017 as Grand Avenue, a district evoking present-day downtown Los Angeles, with vintage office buildings and warehouses. The new area opened on September 29, 2017, with BaseLine as its eating-and-drinking anchor.[2]
The pub took over the building next to the Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater Restaurant that had previously housed the Writer's Stop, a bookshop, bakery and lounge that had occupied the corner in various forms since the park's early years. Traces of the earlier tenant survive as decoration inside the pub.
The opening came at a transitional moment for the park: Toy Story Land and Galaxy's Edge were still under construction, and Grand Avenue, sitting between the Muppets area and the future Galaxy's Edge entrance, gave guests a finished corner of the new park to use while the work continued around it.
Setting
In the area's fiction, the brick building was once the home of the Figueroa Printing Company, a small family — "mom-and-pop" — print house that had enjoyed a flourishing partnership with the Disney Studios in nearby Burbank.[3] The pub presents itself as the print shop's afterlife: a business that moved in once printing moved out, keeping the old company's traces in place. Printing details run through the décor, from type and letterpress references and print-shop paperwork on the walls to signage built from individual letter slugs of the kind a printer would set by hand.
Inside, the room is small and deliberately pub-like, with exposed brick, dark wood, high tables and a bar, seating only a few dozen guests indoors. Most of the seating is outside, on a shaded terrace of high tables and umbrellas along Grand Avenue, which has made the pub a popular place to sit with a drink and watch the crowds moving between the front of the park and Galaxy's Edge. It opens daily from late morning and trades on a walk-up basis, without reservations.
Cuisine
The drinks list is the point of the place. The taps concentrate on California breweries — craft ales, lagers and cider, changing over time, with Los Angeles brewers such as Golden Road regularly represented — alongside Californian wines on tap, a small cocktail list and non-alcoholic options including soda on tap. A build-your-own beer flight, served as four short pours with notes on each, is the standard way first-time visitors approach the list, and pours are notably generous by Walt Disney World standards.[4]
Food is intentionally limited to things that go with beer. The two fixtures are a large Bavarian pretzel served warm with beer-cheese fondue and spicy mustard, and a California cheese and charcuterie plate built around Californian cheeses such as Point Reyes blue and Sonoma goat cheese, with cured meats, cornichons, grapes and toasted bread. Smaller items such as spiced almonds and, at times, a flatbread or a steak puff have rounded out a menu that has stayed short throughout the pub's life. It is a lounge with snacks rather than a restaurant, and most guests treat it as a stop between attractions rather than a meal in itself.
See also
References
- ↑ https://www.wdwmagic.com/dining/baseline-tap-house/news/29sep2017-photos---baseline-tap-house-now-open-at-disneys-hollywood-studios.htm
- ↑ https://attractionsmagazine.com/baseline-tap-house-grand-avenue-now-open-hollywood-studios/
- ↑ https://touringplans.com/blog/baseline-tap-house-opens-disneys-hollywood-studios/
- ↑ https://www.disneytouristblog.com/baseline-tap-house-review/