Review: Garden Grill Restaurant with physically distanced characters

Ahoy! I recently visited the Garden Grill restaurant in Epcot to check in on our favorite characters and delicious food. Here’s my full report.

The seating

Garden Grill Restaurant is located inside the Land pavilion in EPCOT. When you enter the park, stay to the RIGHT and you’ll go past the Seas with Nemo pavilion before reaching the Land.

At this time, the Garden Grill is only using the lower section of the restaurant rings for guest seating. It’s the preferred location for the view of Living with the Land as well. The characters, which will talk about later, will appear on the upper ring of the seating area.

All the tables that are in use have great views and are physically separated from other guests. The tables are cleaned and sanitized after each use.

Garden Grill Restaurant is currently only available for Lunch and Dinner.

The view

One of the more fun aspects of the Garden Grill is the view. Guests are seated in a round restaurant that rotates as they eat. You will have an opportunity look down into a section of the Living with the Land attraction.

This view allows you to see the farmer’s house, the scarecrow and the Buffaloes in the distance. Children always enjoy taking a peek down into the ride and you can take some unique photos as well. The Living with the Land attraction recently added plastic dividers between the rows, that affect the views, you can read about that here.

The food

The Garden Grill restaurant is still offering the same famous skillet service with beef, turkey, cornbread dressing, mashed potatoes, green beans and a corn medley. It’s the type of food you might enjoy for Thanksgiving at Grandma’s house.

Macaroni and Cheese is also served in a passable bowl. A large bowl of garden salad is also provided to each table.

I’m not a fan of Chimichurri sauce, so I requested a small portion of beef without it and the server was kind enough to provide that for me. The skillets are refillable and you can request more of any offering.

Guests may pay an additional fee for children’s character drinks, or frozen lemonade. Adults may also purchase a variety of alcoholic beverages.

Dessert was a strawberry shortcake with whipped cream.

The Characters

The reason that most guests choose this meal is the character interaction. Even though the characters don’t currently hug or touch guests due to Covid-19 precautions, they are still a great deal of fun to interact with. You can still use many of the great tips on Character Locator to interact with these characters as well as the others that pop up in Epcot. You can read about them here.

The four characters you will find include Chip, Dale, Pluto and Mickey Mouse. Sometimes they are alone and sometimes they appear together. You will typically see them 3 or 4 times during your dinner.

You are welcomed to take a selfie with the characters, but Cast Members cannot currently offer photo assistance and there is no Photopass photographer at this restaurant.

You can still use many of the great tips on Character Locator to interact with these characters as well as the others that pop up in Epcot.

Because autographs are not currently offered, each family is offered one of these adorable cards. The front offers an image of the characters in the Garden Grill environment. The back has their pre-printed autograph.

I would request two of these for your memory book or to frame with your photos, that way you can have the front and back visible.

Overall, we had a great time and found the characters excited to see us and interact with us. It is a little different with no character hugs or close up photos, but I appreciate that Disney is making efforts to keep the life in the meal with the characters present.

You might consider having one member of your party take photos of the remainder of the family, then doing a group selfie with the characters.

The cost of the meal is $58.58 per adult and $38.34 per child tax included.

Feel free to ask me any questions and I’ll be happy to answer!

-KtP