As you might guess, the Honey Bee-stro is an outdoor kitchen focused on dishes with honey as an ingredient. I’m not sure I would say the food here showcases honey in all instances, but every item has it as a component. The outdoor kitchen is part of the Epcot Flower & Garden Festival. Here in our Honey Bee-stro review, we’ll talk about the food, if we think it is worth the price. We’ll have pictures of it all too.
The Honey Bee-stro makes its third appearance at the festival. You’ll find the booth along the walkway from the Imagination and Land pavilions heading into World Showcase. If you are in World Showcase, you’ll find it across the walkway from the new Starbucks location. It’s technically not right on the World Showcase loop, but you can see it from the walkway.
Let’s take a look at the Honey Bee-stro menu. Here’s what you’ll find at this outdoor kitchen:
- Roasted Cauliflower with Buckwheat Honey Carrot Puree, Wild Rice Pilaf, Asparagus, Honey Blistered Grapes, Sunflower Brittle and Coriander Flowers (GF) (KA)
- Honey Tandoori Chicken Flatbread with White Cheddar Cheese, Charred Vegetables, Clover Honey Sour Cream and Micro Citrus Greens
- Local Wildflower Honey-Mascarpone Cheesecake with Orange Blossom Honey Ice Cream garnished with Fennel Pollen Meringue Kisses (KA)
There are several drinks, some with and some without alcohol on the menu. You can find them in the picture above. We have a post if you are interested in the outdoor kitchen menus at the Flower & Garden Festival. We should also mention that we have a Guide to the 2020 Epcot Flower & Garden Festival.
Let’s look at the Honey Bee-stro food.
Roasted Cauliflower with Buckwheat Honey Carrot Puree, Wild Rice Pilaf, Asparagus, Honey Blistered Grapes, Sunflower Brittle and Coriander Flowers (GF) (KA) – $4.50
The Roasted Cauliflower is one of relatively few gluten free items around the Epcot Flower & Garden Festival. Given that Carla made a “Bee” line for it! Yes, terrible pun, I know, but I couldn’t resist. I will say it doesn’t hurt that we had this last year and loved it. Fortunately, Disney understood they had a quality dish on their hands and didn’t mess with it. In addition to being gluten free, it also carries the “Kid Approved” designation, which is a bit odd. The ingredients can be adventurous for most kids. I’m not sure why they assigned this to designation here. That said, our girls were split on this dish.
The flavor of the Roasted Cauliflower is excellent. Each of the dish’s components is good, but the real standout to us was the honey carrot puree. It had a great flavor that blended well with the rice pilaf and cauliflower. Roasting the cauliflower gave it a smokiness that we love, but we generally love roasted vegetables. We thoroughly enjoyed this dish, but you need to be open to different flavors. If you aren’t, you probably won’t enjoy this.
There’s some good value here, as you get a healthy portion for only $4.50. This is definitely a dish we would get again.
Honey Tandoori Chicken Flatbread with White Cheddar Cheese, Charred Vegetables, Clover Honey Sour Cream and Micro Citrus Greens – $5.75
The Honey Tandoori Chicken Flatbread makes a return to the festival this year. The flatbread is something that our kids loved. The chicken sits on naan bread and is paired with white cheddar cheese. It is as close to a pizza as the girls could find at a Flower & Garden booth, so they appreciated it. Visually, it isn’t the most attractive dish you will find.
Surprisingly, the naan wasn’t soggy, which was my big concern with something that is sitting under a heat lamp for a while. The honey sour cream was excellent and provided some needed sweetness to cut the savory tones of the flatbread. The chicken itself was just okay, but everything else on it was well done.
Overall, this is another winning dish at the Honey Bee-stro. At $5.75, you get a decent amount of food, so there is some value in that.
Local Wildflower Honey-Mascarpone Cheesecake with Orange Blossom Honey Ice Cream garnished with Fennel Pollen Meringue Kisses (KA) – $5.00
While our first two dishes were delicious, the star of the Honey Bee-stro outdoor kitchen is the Honey-Mascarpone Cheesecake. This is one of those dishes that we think you absolutely must get.
The cheesecake comes with orange blossom honey ice cream and two fennel pollen meringue kisses. I could do without the meringue kisses. It’s not that they were bad, but they just don’t add much to the dish. But give me MOOORRREEE of the cheesecake and ice cream. This dessert is worthy of being on a menu at one of the signature restaurants of Disney World. It is that good!
This is a light and airy cheesecake, not a dense one. There is a good amount of honey in the ice cream, as you can see in the picture above. As it melted, the honey pooled together. That allowed us to grab heaps of it when we scooped up the ice cream or the cheesecake. Those shots of honey were fabulous.
Honey-Peach Freeze in a Souvenir Spike the Bee Sipper Cup – $15
After the Orange Bird Sipper Cup was a huge hit last year, Disney decided to take another shot at a second one for the Epcot Flower & Garden Festival. This year was the Spike the Bee Sipper Cup. You can see it above. It is super cute, and the kids loved it. Is it worth $10? Probably not, but it’s a fun souvenir. Why do I say it is worth $10? Well, you can order the Honey Peach Freeze in a regular cup for $4.50. Maybe there is a portion difference too, but I wasn’t going to measure things out.
If you are a frequent guest of the festival, you’ll recognize Spike from the various flower displays around the park where he is part of a scavenger hunt. Spike has a much deeper history with Disney and the Fab 5. He’s a character that was featured in several Disney cartoons of the 1940s and 50s.
As for the Honey-Peach Freeze itself, we loved it! We loved it so much that we came back to the booth two additional times just to order it without the sipper. It’s interesting that they call it a freeze because we didn’t get any icy texture in the drink. It was creamy and smooth, which made it filling and refreshing. Oddly, we never got much of a peach flavor in the drink. Honey was the dominant flavor, and we were okay with that. We all thought it was more indicative of a yogurt-based smoothie but thicker. In any case, we loved this drink. Hopefully, it will be back next year
Other Drinks at The Honey Bee-Stro
That is everything we sampled at the Honey Bee-stro. The other drinks you can have here are:
- Nektar New Wave Lemonade Mead, Ferndale MI
- Florida Orange Groves Winery Orange Blossom Honey Wine, St. Petersburg, FL
- Honey-Peach Freeze with Blueberry Vodka
Wrapping Up Our Honey Bee-stro Review
Overall, the Honey Bee-stro was one of the best outdoor kitchens of the Epcot Flower & Garden Festival. We think you will do well eating here. Pairing the cauliflower, cheesecake, and honey-peach freeze would be a great meal if maybe a little sweet. But we are okay with that.
If you are interested in more of our Epcot Flower & Garden Festival outdoor kitchen reviews, we’ll link to them down here as we finish them! We hope you enjoy the food and the reviews!