By: Sarah Stone
My husband and I are huge fans of the EPCOT Food and Wine Festival, and being Floridians and Disney World annual pass holders, we make sure to go every year. The Festival highlights delicious bites inspired by the many destinations celebrated at EPCOT, including Belgium, Canada, India, Kenya, Mexico, Morocco, and many more. Despite our best efforts, we’ve never been able to get at least one food or drink from every outpost, but we made a good dent this year.
If you’ve been to EPCOT, you may have strong opinions about which country should start your ’round-the-world tour: Mexico or Canada. Dave and I always start in Mexico and work our way clockwise, indulging in our favorite EPCOT pastime of Drinking Around the World (regardless of whether we’re there for Food and Wine). For this trip, however, we changed things up and started in Canada, opting to try to get either a small bite or a drink to share from every other pavilion while also trying to make at least two trips around the entire circle.
In addition to making a couple of trips around the World Showcase, we had a goal to try at least five items from Emile’s Fromage Montage—a sampling of cheese dishes from 10 different marketplaces. For each one you pick up, you get a stamp in your Food and Wine Festival Passport. Once you collect five stamps, you can take your passport to the Shimmering Sips outpost to claim a prize. Were we successful? Barely!
Here are a few photos from our fabulous Food and Wine Festival experience—enjoy!
Ready to start the day!
Our festival passport, which details all of the amazing food and drinks you can get around the world.
I started the day with some macaroni and cheese at Mac & Eats. It’s been my favorite since I was a kid, so of course I have to try it out (even if it is at 11am!)
Dave started with a Mongolian beef bao bun at the China festival booth.
I will never turn down the opportunity to eat poutine! Of course this was at the Canada pavilion, and I judged Dave’s obvious lack of taste turning down the cheese curds, fries, and gravy.
We loved this cheddar and bacon soup at the Canada pavilion so much that we went back later for seconds. Between this, the poutine, and the ciders we came back for later in the evening—and the ‘Canada, Far and Wide’ 360 narrated by national treasures Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy (outside of Food and Wine; during the festival, the theater is used as a bar and hangout)—I’m starting to think we should start alternating our start spot instead of defaulting to Mexico.
We’ve passed this Grand Marnier orange slush so many times on other trips that we had to try it this time (with an extra shot on top)—delicious and very dangerous! Especially because I drank up half of it and said “Hey is it weird that I feel nothing at all and it’s like 100 degrees out? Anyway, what’s next!”
Another one we got more of later: pão de quiejo in Brazil! Pull the bread apart and it’s filled with cheese.
This raclette from the Alps is about where I started running out of steam (several hours in, but still—soooo much bread and cheese by this point). Fortunately Dave loves bread and I love pickles, so we shared the cheese and our respective sides of the raclette bite without wasting a bit of it.
We loved this little wine flight from the Alps.
We were OBSESSED with this crispy paneer in India! And it was our fifth cheese dish from Emile’s Fromage Montage, so we headed over to Shimmering Sips to collect our prize…
A delightful and super cute cheesecake dessert awaited us once we collected all five stamps! And we couldn’t help but pick up a mimosa flight to complement the prize.
My second-favorite part about visiting EPCOT: the light shows!
All in all, we walked more than 20,000 steps, ate and drank far more than any human should, and we had an absolute blast. Can’t wait for Food and Wine next year!
About the Author
As the editor-in-chief of Frayed Passport, my goal is to help you build a lifestyle that lets you travel the world whenever you want and however long you want, and not worry about where your next paycheck will come from. I've been to 20+ countries and five continents, lived for years as a full-time digital nomad, and have worked completely remotely since 2015. If you would like to share your story with our community, or partner with Frayed Passport, get in touch with me at sarah@frayedpassport.com!