Perhaps this post will resonate more with Florida natives, but I have some words of advice for anyone planning a trip to Disney’s Epcot:
Don’t force yourself to “drink around the world.”
With the pending exceptions of Harry Potter World (which I haven’t visited yet) and the Star Wars theme park (opening in 2019), Disney’s Epcot is probably my favorite thing in Orlando. The northern portion of the park is devoted to innovation and progress, featuring rides that walk you through human history and laude the technological achievements possible within the near future, but this is not my favorite part of the park. You see, the southern half of Epcot contains a series of simulated countries, and while the stores and statues are all interesting, the real attractions are the restaurants. Staffed by people from those nations, the Epcot restaurants contain some surprisingly authentic cuisine, and if you visit during one of the summer festivals, the selection is even more impressive.
Jessi and I took a mini-honeymoon in the Disney parks a few weeks ago, and much of our visit centered around exactly this strategy: hit Epcot during the Food & Flower Festival so we could share a drink in each nation. With 11 countries total, this meant sharing 11 drinks between us (i.e. five and a half drinks each) over the course of an afternoon and evening— more than either of us would normally have, but within reason for a vacation. We established our order:
(1) Start with a beer in Canada.
(2) Have an early dinner and another beer in England.
(3) Grab a dessert cocktail in France. Wait. Yuck, what is this thing?
(4) Enjoy a delicious spiked coffee in Morocco.
(5) Whatever Japan has to offer. Sake? It’ll probably be sake. What is sake anyway? Sounds like a future blog post.
(6) I guess we’ll drink something in America. Do they have bourbon? Oh, come on, does any restaurant in this park have bourbon?
(7) Does Italy have anything besides wine? Ugh, I’m just not a wine guy. Oh well, every restaurant in Disney has a couple of repeated signature cocktails, so maybe we’ll get one of those here.
(8) We’ve been doing a lot of beer already, but hey, it’s Germany. Beer me, Germany.
(9) What’s China’s signature spirit anyway? I guess we’ll find out.
(10) Norway, huh? I hope it’s cooled off enough to justify another spiked coffee.
(11) Yes, Mexico! Time for a truly kickass margarita!
As you can see, we quickly encountered a problem with the strategy: not every country had something we wanted to drink. In fact, once we got to the park and studied the menus more thoroughly, we gave up pretty quickly. The Canadian and English cocktails actually looked pretty interesting, so our “intersperse cocktails with beer” strategy immediately went out the window. At stop #3, as we sipped a bitter French slushy (pictured at right), we conceded this drink selection wasn’t our thing. We got our spiked coffee in Morocco (a 1-to-1 mix of Frangelico and espresso I’ll definitely be recreating at home this winter), and then we skipped everything else but the peppercorn guava margarita at the end. I could make some snobby observations about pre-mixed ingredients and the bartender holding the shaker upside-down, but at the end of the day, that was still a damn fine margarita.
When it comes to drinking at theme parks, there’s a fundamental flaw: mass appeal. A theme park will always have costs to consider, and unlike swanky cocktail bars, theme parks don’t attract such a specific market. A theme park can’t justify having Old Fashioneds at all their restaurants since the dominant American palate is still “bring on the fructose,” and the Epcot cocktail selections reflect this. Even with the additional cocktail offerings for the Food & Flower Festival, most of the drinks available to us were brightly-colored vehicles for grenadine, and the calorie content was far more intimidating than the ABV. While I might expect something sweeter in my Mexican margarita at the end, it was a little surprising to find a bright green rum-based drink in England (even though, for the record, the bright green rum-based drink turned out to be half decent).
The takeaway here? Epcot (for all its attempts at authenticity) is still a simulation, and it will cater more to American tastes and sensibilities. Don’t feel pressured to “drink around the world.” Just go, relax, have fun, and order the drinks that sound genuinely good to you. If you really want an authentic sampling of drinks from around the world, a solid cocktail bar would serve you better.
Unless you want a margarita.
Epcot margaritas are amazing.