2018 Epcot Festival of the Arts; or, I’m Just Going to Eat Everything

I’m so excited that Disney decided to bring back the International Festival of the Arts for another year. More so that they decided to run the event all week rather than just three days… kind of.

In 2017 for the inaugural event, Disney only ran the event three days a week- Saturday, Sunday and Monday. As a result, I was only able to go once and didn’t get the full experience. While this year’s event sees the food and art booths open every day, the big stuff still only happens on the weekends.

Small victories?

I’ve been slowly introducing my friend Kayla to the world of Disney on our shared off days, and after a few weeks of not getting to see each other, we reunited for our first theme park day of 2018! Naturally, I wanted to check out the Festival while it was still fresh. (Unlike when I failed about blogging about Food and Wine last year)

This is posting on a Friday but Kayla and I visited on Wednesday when the festival was pretty much just the food and art booths along with the fun photo-ops going on. The seminars and other entertainment are reserved for the weekend so I can’t speak much on those.

But who cares? It’s really about the food isn’t it?

Well, for me it is.

I will say there was a lot of amazing art all along the way but unless you are stinking rich- it’s just fun to look at… from a distance… where you can’t destroy it.

Because we planned our outing at something of the last minute I was only able to snag one decent fast pass for the day which mean we started off our morning with a run on Test Track.

From there it was off to the festival. I was dead set on trying some of the food from The Deconstructed Dish. Specifically the Cheesecake, but the BLT was calling my name as well… because… bacon….

Both were pretty damn amazing and I’ll certainly be visiting the cheesecake again the next chance that I get.

Today really just consisted of walking around World Showcase while we decided on our next food/drink move. Kayla had never had the Grand Marnier Slush from France so even though it’s not a festival-specific item, we had to get one!

Next on our to-do list was to try some foods from The Painted Panda. Kayla loves Pandas so I wanted her to see the Coconut Panda Rice Cake and I wanted to try the Crispy Fried Shrimp. We ended up with both.

The panda was good but could have used some salt. It is all rice so don’t expect any meat or fish filling like sushi. The coconut made it a bit sweet but good. But seriously, some salt would have been good.

Unless you’re DYING for some shrimp I would bypass the Crispy Shrimp option. While the flavor was good, it just wasn’t worth the $8.50 price tag that they slapped on it.

The Artful Photo Ops are easily my favorite part of the festival as they give you a chance to step into some world famous art… and act like an idiot… which we did.

Well, we took one seriously:

Then we went on a booze cruise with George Washington:

Until I kicked Kayla out of the boat:

And then there’s whatever is going on here:

A return to the menu from last year was the Pop’t Art which is a sugar cookie with strawberry filling. The top is an abstract art piece. I ended up sharing it with Kayla because it was a bit much. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world but I’m not particularly clamoring to have it again.

My eating around the world ended at The Artist’s Table with the Pan-seared Scallop. I love scallops so this was a no-brainer for me and it was totally worth it.

All said and done, even though we didn’t get the full festival experience, we had a really great time with our theme-park nonsense. It’s most evident in the picture at the very end of this post, but I decided to Disneybound as Aladdin for this trip. It was a last-minute choice so Kayla and I didn’t coordinate but it was a lot of fun.

I think the last time I actually pulled out a full-on Disneybound was when Leslie Kay was last in town and her and I were tearing it up around the parks. That was in 2016 I think?

Wow, I didn’t Disneybound once in 2017 outside of races.

Next week we have plans to hit Magic Kingdom and we’re going to both be Disneybounding. I’m hoping we maintain the cooler weather because the outfit I want to wear requires pants.

We’ll see what happens.

This post has lost focus.

Goodbye.