Walt Disney World’s flagship foodie festival is now underway. The 2025 EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival is the year’s marquee event, running through November 22nd for a total of 87 days. This review covers our impressions of the longest-running annual event at EPCOT, now in its 30th year.
Before we get going, it’s worth noting that this is a review of the 2025 EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival as a whole, not just the Global Marketplaces. Those suck up all of the oxygen when it comes to coverage, which is a mistake. Every event at EPCOT has food booths; it’s the other stuff that makes them special. The problem is that blogs, vlogs, social media, and even regular fans fixate on the Global Marketplaces, reinforcing the notion that they’re all that matters.
By contrast, coverage of other EPCOT events focuses on the other highlights, and for good reason–they’re the heart and soul of those festivals! Plenty of Walt Disney World fans and out-of-state Annual Passholders book trips during these events just to experience what they have to offer. Many do the same for Food & Wine, and we suspect a lot of that is due to tradition or, quite simply, inertia. EPCOT’s Food & Wine Festival was the marquee event for ~25 years, and it takes a while for perceptions, reputation, and guest behavior to change.
Nevertheless, if you’re only concerned with the Global Marketplaces and don’t care about what else these events normally offer, this review isn’t for you. You should instead check out our Best Dishes & Desserts at 2025 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival. While this year doesn’t have one of the all-time best culinary lineups, the 2025 event is actually pretty good when you’re singularly focused on the dishes, desserts and drinks.
The menus at the 2025 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival actually do a pretty good job of balancing adventurous eats with crowd-pleasing, comfort cuisine. I’m a firm believer that you need to meet guests where they are, but at the same time, this is a food festival. The new additions from 2020-2023, highlighted by a french fries booth, would’ve been the equivalent of Cannes Film Festival only screening movies from the Boss Baby franchise.
In the last couple of years, the Global Marketplace menus have threaded the needle much better. There are still the basic booths with boring menus, but there are also interesting and ambitious ones. My biggest grievances with the Global Marketplaces at this point are two-fold.
First, that the new Gyozas of the Galaxy and Coastal Eats booths don’t open until September 28, 2025.
The former is the only brand-new Global (Intergalactic?) Marketplace, so that’s disappointing. The other tends to be one of the better booths, with refreshing seafood dishes that are best enjoyed in late summer. In all likelihood, these booths will further bolster the lineup when they debut.
Second, that so many of the dishes held at an event beginning in late August in Central Florida are hot and heavy. There are several soups & stews, chili, noodles, and other items that make no sense in triple-digit feels like temperatures. It’s been this way for years. Do the people making these menus never leave their air-conditioned offices or understand Orlando weather?
Some of these hot and heavy dishes are great. They’re perfect for the actual autumn months of October and November. Even something as simple as having a few booths with phased seasonal menus, a la EPCOT Farmers Feast during Flower & Garden, would be a thoughtful and guest-friendly enhancement.
Start with cool and refreshing dishes, such as vichyssoise or gazpacho, and then roll out the stews and soups in October and November. This might seem like such an inconsequential thing on which to fixate, and perhaps it is, but it underscores the notion for me that Walt Disney World isn’t putting a ton of thought or care into the EPCOT Food & Wine Festival.
Those quibbles aside, it’s not the cuisine at the 2025 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival that’s the primary problem. It’s everything else.
My biggest complaint about the 2025 EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival is that decor package is completely unchanged. The iconography, in-park photo ops, decorations, and logos are all identical to last year, which were unchanged from the year before…and year before…and so on. In fact, this exact same visual style has been used every year since the 2020 Taste of EPCOT Food & Wine Festival.
Displays, logos, graphics, etc., all used to change every single year of the EPCOT Food & Wine Festival. The fresh look was something we always appreciated, especially as a contrast to Diet EPCOT. Six years of the same stuff for Walt Disney World’s longest seasonal event feels beyond tired at this point.
They didn’t exactly nail these visuals so well in 2020 in the first place. It’s not as if the team can’t top what was done back then and is choosing to not mess with perfection. Worse yet, there aren’t many of them on display throughout the park. When you take decor that’s stale and throw in sparseness, it just comes across as incredibly underwhelming.
Frankly, when you contrast this with something like the EPCOT Festival of the Arts or Flower & Garden, it’s even worse by comparison. Those events go all-out with their decor packages, having art installations or topiaries throughout the park. Guests love this sort of thing, and even those aren’t all-new every single year (or even close to it), the added decorations add a festive touch to the park.
Unfortunately, the flagship 2025 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival doesn’t make the park look all that much different than it did during Diet EPCOT this summer. I’m actually fairly confident that it had more decor back during the 2020 Taste of EPCOT Food & Wine Festival. Despite Disney filling in the Giant EPCOT Dirt Pit behind Spaceship Earth, no new decorations have been added to this entire area.
There’s no display behind Spaceship Earth, nothing in that weird planter, and no Chef Figment topiary (or any topiary). There are no installations whatsoever past the planter right at the front entrance. I could share a photo from last year and you wouldn’t know the difference.
When it comes to decorations, Future World looks exactly the same as it did back in 2020 when the area was a maze of construction walls. Nothing consequential has been added. For the most part, what they’ve done is just swap out the year for the last 6 years.
Well, I take that back. There are new trash can wraps in the former Future World, which is arguably the highlight of the decorations (no, I’m not kidding). Those trash cans help make this walkway pop a bit and I’d love to see even more of them–especially in World Showcase where they double as table tops. I don’t want to criticize the lovely trash cans too much, but I do think it’s a bit telling that we just dedicated a paragraph to trash cans and called them a potential highlight of the event.
I’m not expecting Flower & Garden Festival 2.0 here, but it’s wild to me that nothing has been done with any of these planters. Most of them are just simple green spaces, and they’re begging for more ornamentation and installations. (See our World Celebration & CommuniCore at EPCOT Review: Better Than a Dirt Pit & Walls, I Guess? for a deeper dive into just how boring this area looks.) Instead, you could walk from Spaceship Earth to the front of World Showcase without knowing that a festival is even happening.
This is especially frustrating because the EPCOT Food & Wine Festival is reliant on repeat visitors, locals and fans. All of us notice this stuff. And while some of you reading this might think my fixation on the decor package is overblown, I can guarantee you’d be impressed or at least pleasantly surprised if the counterfactual were true and Walt Disney World put serious effort into a fresh look for Food & Wine. Fans would be drawn by photos & videos of the event, wanting to see and experience the reinvigorated event for themselves.
It’s not as if a modestly ambitious decor package would have broken the bank. We’re talking pennies in the grand scheme of things, and the return on investment would easily justify the costs. It’s truly baffling how a company that routinely wastes massive amounts of money can also be so cheap and penny-pinching, even in downright counterproductive ways!
Instead, they phone in the festival element because the EPCOT Food & Wine Festival enjoys a certain reputation that was forged over its first two-plus decades. But that won’t last forever, and we’ve already seen fading fan interest in this event over the last few years (hence it being counterproductive to cheap out on the event). Meanwhile, the EPCOT Festival of the Arts continues to explode in popularity. Gee, I wonder why?!
Back when we were out-of-state Annual Passholders living in the Midwest, we could be enticed to book long weekend trips for special events like this. We did that regularly for EPCOT festivals, Star Wars Weekends, and other themed events. But for this blog, the EPCOT Food & Wine Festival would be safely skippable.
We’d still do trips during the other EPCOT festivals, but there’s nothing compelling about this one for us, as repeat visitors, anymore. Plenty of other fans are going to disagree, but I know there are a not-insignificant number of out-of-state APs/DVC Members who do think similarly. Walt Disney World could certainly benefit from capturing those fans during the two slowest months of the year.
Nevertheless, I’m guessing many of you will not care about decorations and enhancements. That’s perfectly fine! We know plenty of Walt Disney World fans who still enjoy EPCOT’s Food & Wine Festival. They like revisiting familiar favorites and have a certain sentimentality about the longest-running annual event, now in its 30th year. Accordingly, you may want to take my perspective on the 2025 EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival with a grain of salt if you only care about the cuisine and are reasonably satisfied with this year’s menus.
One notable change for the 2025 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival is that there’s no “center” for the event.
Prior to its debut, CommuniCore Hall was pitched as this. Walt Disney World marketed the flex space, which replaced the shelved multi-level festival center concept, as a “state-of-the-art show kitchen” that “may even attract a few special culinary guests.” In Disney’s own words, it was to be a “dynamic space to anchor” EPCOT Festivals and was to be “limited only by the boundaries of imagination.”
In actuality, CommuniCore Hall is not any of those things. The interior looks like a hospital cafeteria or convention center flex space or airport terminal, and is the low point of the underwhelming Future World overhaul. This purpose-built space is somehow inferior to the retrofits done with the Odyssey, Wonders of Life, or World ShowPlace Pavilion. Walt Disney World should use one of the latter two spaces as the festival center for Food & Wine.
On a positive note, CommuniCore Hall has been leveraged better with each festival since last year’s Food & Wine, culminating in the GoofyCore Hall play space for the underrated Cool Kid Summer. As we’ve written elsewhere, GoofyCore Hall should just become permanent and Disney should go back to the drawing board with the festival center concept somewhere else.
Because the since-ended Cool Kid Summer overlapped with the start of the 2025 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival, there’s nothing currently in CommuniCore Hall. On the one hand, it’s disappointing to have nothing in this space given how sparse Food & Wine already is. On the other hand, it was really poorly utilized last year–whereas GoofyCore Hall was great. So I’m not going to complain here. My hope is that Walt Disney World still has bigger and better unannounced plans for CommuniCore Hall during the second half of the 2025 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival.
To end this section on a positive and practical note, I will add that CommuniCore Plaza (the area outside the hall) has some excellent and underutilized shaded seating. This is not too far of a walk from Harvest Hollow, where it can be difficult to find a table that isn’t in direct sunlight. So it’s worth a walk over to CommuniCore Plaza if you want a nice spot to enjoy your eats.
Another unequivocal positive is Harvest Hollow.
Harvest Hollow is the area along the Rose Walk, behind Journey into Imagination and between Future World and World Showcase. It’s home to three of the best booths of the 2025 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival, and some of the most ambitious dishes and desserts. (Seriously, don’t sleep on that trout!) This is our go-to spot for an evening meal at EPCOT. We’re big fans of the 3 booths in this area, plus another 2-3 that are on the periphery.
If Harvest Hollow sounds familiar, that might be because it isn’t completely new. This concept has existed before by other names–it was just redone for the third time since 2018, and was previously the Culinary Corridor based on the now-defunct ABC television series, The Chew. Those always used to be among our favorite Food Studios, and now this new area carries on that tradition.
Harvest Hollow debuted last year and was great. It’s even better in 2025. The seating area is more thoughtfully done, there’s a play area, and there are actually unique decorations! One of the highlights is that there’s new wildlife lore, suggesting that bears and other woodland critters are preparing the cuisine in this area. It’s adorable, and infused with a level of ambition not found in the rest of the event.
In terms of other stuff, none of it has returned for the 2025 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival. This includes culinary seminars, demonstrations, meals with celebrity chefs, and other special events. These have been on hiatus since 2019–the last normal year of the event.
The belief was that they’d return once the EPCOT overhaul was finished. Two years later, and there’s no sign of that ever happening. The only exception to that this year is the the return of the Parisian Breakfast Buffet at Chefs de France; this is already proving popular, so here’s hoping more third parties pick up the slack and add special meals like this in 2026!
Instead, the 2025 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival is basically just the Global Marketplaces, Eat to the Beat concerts, a scavenger hunt, and merchandise. Again, though, all of that is present at other events. There’s nothing to distinguish this from any of the other EPCOT festivals. All of the rest have “something else” that makes them distinct draws.
Ultimately, the biggest issues with the 2025 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival are what’s still missing in terms of added enhancements, as well as the extremely stale decorations. This event, the longest-running festival of the year at EPCOT and Walt Disney World’s supposed flagship foodie festival, is basically just Diet EPCOT plus a couple dozen food kiosks. Beyond that, there’s no there there.
We love the Global Marketplaces, and these have become our favorite way to eat around EPCOT regardless of the season. So we don’t mean to be overly dismissive of those. But food booths exist ~9 months of the year, and frankly, the menus are as good or better at the other 3 festivals. For us, this is what firmly cements the EPCOT Food & Wine Festival as our least favorite event of the year, and by a fairly wide margin. In case you’re wondering, here are those rankings:
- EPCOT International Festival of the Arts
- EPCOT International Festival of the Holidays
- EPCOT International Flower & Garden Festival
- …Huge Gap…
- EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival
There’s not much daylight between the top 3, and our favorite among those can shift with mood, weather, etc. Christmas is our favorite time of year at Walt Disney World, and Festival of the Holidays is sneakily good thanks to Candlelight Processional and the Holiday Storytellers.
Nothing reminds me of OG EPCOT Center like Festival of the Arts, which is a truly ambitious event with a lot of underrated food. Flower & Garden has dozens upon dozens of topiaries and other gardening features, and few parks are as pretty as EPCOT in bloom. These three events are fantastic; we’d enthusiastically recommend all of them.
Then there’s the EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival. It has something for everyone when it comes to cuisine, but I’m not sure it could be called more foodie-centric than the aforementioned events. And that’s really about it–the festival has no other hook.
My sincere hope is that someone at Walt Disney World recognizes this before it’s too late, and stops trying to milk the EPCOT Food & Wine cash cow to the point that it’s dry. This festival could be so much more, and has been in the past. With EPCOT’s overhaul now finished, there’s no excuse for the event to continue being a shadow of its former self. I would love to stop recycling these same criticisms, but that requires Walt Disney World to stop reheating the same stale leftovers.
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YOUR THOUGHTS
Are you excited for the 2025 EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival? Disappointed that the look of the event is pretty much identical to the past two years? What do you think of the lineup of Global Marketplaces? Upset that there’s nothing in terms of “edutainment” or anything special to separate this from any of the other EPCOT events? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!