Beaches and Cream Soda Shop
Beaches and Cream Soda Shop is a table-service restaurant and ice cream parlour at Disney's Beach Club Resort at Walt Disney World. Modelled on an old-fashioned American soda fountain, it serves diner food — burgers, sandwiches, soups and hot dogs — but is famous chiefly for its ice cream, and above all for the Kitchen Sink, a sharing sundae made with multiple scoops, every topping the shop keeps and a whole can of whipped cream. It sits beside Stormalong Bay, the pool complex shared by the Beach Club and its sister resort, Disney's Yacht Club Resort, a short walk from the International Gateway entrance to EPCOT.
History
Beaches and Cream opened with Disney's Beach Club Resort in November 1990; the resort itself opened on 19 November 1990, two weeks after the Yacht Club. The soda shop was part of the original resort, evoking the seaside boardwalk parlours of an earlier America to match the Beach Club's turn-of-the-century New England seaside theme. Unlike several of the Yacht and Beach Club restaurants that opened in 1990 and have since closed, Beaches and Cream has operated continuously in the same spot, building a reputation out of proportion to its size — for most of its life it was a very small room, and difficulty getting a table became part of its folklore.
That changed in 2019. The restaurant closed on 26 August 2019 for an extensive refurbishment and expansion into adjoining space formerly used by the resort's arcade. It soft-opened shortly before its formal reopening on 26 December 2019, with a refreshed interior, a dedicated to-go window, an enlarged menu and, most importantly, substantially more seating. The jukebox, a fixture of the original room, returned, and character artwork was added to the walls. The Kitchen Sink and the rest of the established sundae menu survived the rebuild intact.
Setting
The soda shop keeps the visual language of a mid-20th-century American ice cream parlour: a long counter with stools where solo diners and small parties can watch sundaes being built, pastel beach-toned colours, globe lighting and the restored jukebox. Since the 2019 expansion the room is airier, with more tables and booths and a beach-inspired palette softening the original diner look, but it remains an intimate, informal space rather than a large resort restaurant — which is why reservations are strongly recommended even though the menu is casual. Its position on the walkway between the two resorts and the pool makes it a natural stop for guests of both hotels and for park visitors leaving EPCOT by the International Gateway.
Cuisine
The savoury menu is short and deliberately nostalgic: Angus burgers, a grilled cheese sandwich served with creamy tomato soup that has its own following, hot dogs, patty melts, loaded fries and salads, with flavoured sodas, malts and milkshakes made at the fountain. For many guests, however, the meal is only the preliminary to the ice cream menu, which lists sundaes on the beach alongside shakes and floats. The No Way José — chocolate and vanilla ice cream with hot fudge and peanut butter sauce, chocolate and peanut butter morsels and whipped cream — is the most ordered of the conventional sundaes.
The Kitchen Sink is served, with some ceremony, in a bowl shaped like its namesake, lights dimmed and its arrival announced to the room. In its classic form it combines eight scoops of ice cream in several flavours with every topping in the shop, brownies, cake and candy, finished with an entire can of whipped cream and cherries. Smaller and single-flavour variants have been offered over the years. It is priced and sized as a dessert for a table to share, and finishing one is treated as a minor resort rite of passage.