The Garden Grove, found at The Swan Resort, is one of the best kept secrets of dining on Disney property. It is in the EPCOT area of Walt Disney World Resort, and is home to breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus. This restaurant houses a 25-foot oak tree, and as soon as you enter you feel as if you are in Central Park. Garden Grove is part of the Disney Dining Plan, and reservations are highly recommended. Some important things to know about Garden Grove:
- Characters are available at breakfast on Saturdays and Sundays. You can also catch characters at the nightly dinner buffets.
- You never know who the characters will be, and there are only two of them. It might be fun to take your chances and see who shows up!
- The atmosphere is fabulous. During the day, you feel like you are in Central Park, as beautiful sunlight shines through the windows. At night, street lights and paper lanterns light the area.
- Nightly dinner buffets have a theme. Seafood, BBQ, and Mediterranean are some of the common dinner themes.
- Breakfast and dinner buffets are all you can eat, and count as one table service credit per member of your party when using the DDP.
When looking for a unique dining experience, the Garden Grove is the place to be. The atmosphere can’t be beat, you’ll see a few of your favorite characters, and dine to your heart’s content at the buffets.
Overall, we give this Disney restaurant an “A”.
We are looking forward to trying breakfast here in October!
We enjoyed the Southern BBQ buffet at Garden Grove this past October. Perhaps because our reservation was so early (5:30pm), the restaurant was almost empty. This meant that we got special attention from the characters, as well as being able to navigate the buffet with no interference. The food was delicious and the desserts were absolutely amazing!
On Decenber 28, 2011, I took my 2 grown kids for dinner at Garden Grove. It’s been 15 years since we’ve reserved a character meal and this one didn’t disappoint. We had a 5 pm reservation. We were given a pager and were seated by 5:10. The atmosphere is whimsical, with a huge tree situated in the middle of the room. Our server was wonderful. He immediately introduced himself and never rushed us in between courses. The food choices were plentiful, from a carving station to Mac and cheese. Everything that we tried was the right temperature, looked appetizing and tasted delicious. There were so many desserts to choose from, it was dizzying! The chance to take photos with some characters was a highlight of the evening. That night, Pluto and Goofy visited the restaurant. They spent so much time sitting at each table and posing for pictures. Since we don’t usually take many character photos any more, this was a nice treat. All in all, this was a very good choice and we will definitely return to Garden Grove on
our Next trip!