Flower & Garden Looks And Tastes Different This Year

Our post from yesterday explains that Disney is now charging tax on festival dishes. This was a low profile way for them to raise the prices on all festival items without the change being obvious at first glance. In addition to now charging taxes, outdoor kitchens no longer accept cash.

If cash was your plan, you’ll need to purchase a gift card at one of the many merch locations around the park. You must load at least $15 to each card to start.
Kitchen Opening Times
EPCOT kitchens have opened right at 11:00am daily for many years. Not so any longer. Note the hours on the Beach Grub menu board we took today. Kitchens will open 30 minutes later and close 30 minutes earlier Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. They have the usual 11am – 9pm hours on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

Garden Rocks Weekday Performers
We wrote about the changes to the Garden Rocks Concert Series back in February. When Disney announced the list of performers for Flower and Garden, they posted that “talented local acts” would perform during the week and well known acts would appear on the weekends. As of the date of this post, local acts are not shown on Disney’s website or the My Disney Experience app.

We stopped by the America Gardens Theatre and noticed there is a physical sign, above, showing the local acts performing in March. We weren’t able to find information for local, weekday acts for the rest of the festival.
Food Changes?
I’ll preface this next section with a disclaimer that today was the first day of the festival and many of the kitchens seemed to be experiencing hiccups. More than just the usual “Japan ran out of frushi” – which they did. So many dishes we’ve had in the past are different this year and not in a good way. We won’t even talk about size here, just taste and overall value. For example, the Scallops with Spring Pea Risotto, Lemon Beurre Blanc, and Gremolata from Farmers Feast.

The picture on the left is this same dish from the 2025 festival and the shot on the right was from today. It’s supposed to be the same dish. The version on the left was incredible. Our team spent our own money on this one many times through the festival last year and our table of 4 didn’t want to finish the dish on the right. The risotto tasted like something you’d get out of a microwavable bag. The scallops were bland.

The picture above shows the Avocado Toast from BRUNCHCOT in 2025 and today. Not only did this plate increase in price since last year, the dish has decreased in quality. Like a baffling change for the worse. The avocado isn’t fresh and was basically an oily plop of something that was once in the avocado family? There are about a dozen examples of this exact thing around the festival this year. Dishes that used to look like spring and taste like joy are now less awesome than an average dish from any fast food place or even a school cafeteria. Maybe this was just first day wonkiness? Maybe Disney has changed suppliers? Based on the number of dishes we had today that seemed like they were prepped two days ago, I feel confident saying something is amiss.
Everything wasn’t a fail today, though. We did enjoy a few really lovely dishes and we’ll be sharing details on those in the coming days. The entire Nectar booth was a huge success and we would get every dish again.
We’ll be headed back to EPCOT in the next few days to try the dishes that seemed the most off to see if it was just an opening day fluke.

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