Food and Wine Festival

This was our first ever visit to Epcot during the Food and Wine Festival. As someone who lives in Chicago and have been to Taste of Chicago, the concept isn't all too different. The F&W festival certainly, I would think, have a wider cultural range of food than Tastes.

Epcot was certainly nicely decked out for the festival.





We were at Epcot on 3 separate days - Sept. 30th, Oct. 1st, and Oct. 7th., and each day we sampled some of the food being offered.

The state of Oklahoma was being honored with a booth/pavilion/showplace by itself to celebrate its centennial. I didn't get to sample their food offerings, unfortunately.


The pears industry had a representation there, and you get to learn about pears, how to know when they're fully ripened, how to make dishes using them, etc...etc. I attended a couple of short cooking instructions in making pear salads, etc. I only wish they had used an actual chef, rather than an industry representative to do these demo.


I didn't get attend other cooking or food demonstrations. We simply had too much things to do especially with the anniversary activities with Celebration 25.

Now, about the food quality and quantity. In general, they were quite good, even though they were a bit lacking in quantity. I know you're not to expect any significant quantity when you pay between $2 to $3.95 for them, but still, some of them are puny. The calamari stew from Mexico had only TWO (count 'em) thin rings of calamari in it! I'm not expecting a bushel, but c'mon! I thought of all the food that I got, the stuffed cabbage from Poland was of a decent and fair size.

There was one disaster of a food. Don't get the samosa from India. The pasty dough was under-fried. It was doughy and limp, and fell apart as soon as you bite into it. It should have been golden brown and crispy. No indian worth his/her heritage would let something like this pass through. I go to a lot of Indian restaurants, and even the cheap ones do not have samosa this bad (in fact, I find that those are the best places to get really good samosa). So that was highly disappointing.

The empanadas from Argentina was also lacking. While the filling was tasty, again, the pasty was limp! So there seemed to be a constant issue here with the pastry not up to standard. I would have thought Disney would pay a bit more attention to the quality of the product they're serving, especially when the whole purpose is to highlight the food.

All in all, it was a great experience, especially the sampling of various different wines from many different regions of the world.

Zz.