Best New Dishes at the 2024 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival

Many Disney World Food & Wine Festival favorites are repeaters from year to year, and if you’re also an EPCOT Festival repeater, you might be most excited by the dishes that are new. Our team tried all the eats at this year’s Festival, and these are the standout new entries for us.

Red Wine-braised Beef Short Rib | Earth Eats – $8.50

Perhaps we shouldn’t have raved about this dish so much when we wrote about it in our Best $50 sampler, so that we could have more to say about it here. “Love in a bowl”, we wrote. We accused Disney of having someone’s Nona in the tiny Festival kitchen. We just can’t say enough good things about this dish. Silky cheese polenta, tender beef, and an outrageously great puttanesca sauce. Yum, yum. Stop reading and go eat. Mangia!

Lemon Poppyseed Cake | Earth Eats – $4.50

You might notice that this gem is at the same booth as the short rib, and Earth Eats is definitely a contender for one of the best booths of the Festival. We fully endorse all things lemon and this is a hearty bite for the money, a wonderful finish after a savory main. The bright lemon flavor and sweet icing will make you forget that you’ve downed an entire bowl of hot beef in the Florida heat.

Flauta de Barbacoa | Mexico – $8.00

Tiny but mighty, small but fantastic, with a crunchy exterior and perfectly cooked beef. Top it off with salsa verde, crema Mexicana, and queso fresco – classic Mexican flavors that most Americans love – and you’ve got a big winner. It’s big enough to share, but only just – and you might not want to.

Carolina-Style Hot Dog | Flavors of America – $6.75

Our team brought a North Carolina ex-pat with them as a guest Carolina hot dog expert, and he gave this an A+. Our expert, who has made an art of understanding this style of hot dogs, explained that the key is balancing the slaw and the chili. Often the chili is too plentiful or the slaw has too much liquid, vinegar, or sugar. On this dog the slaw was perfect, the balance was perfect, everything was perfect. Everything was so perfect that they have spontaneously mentioned this hot dog at home a few times, so you know we’ll be back for it.

Eel Temaki Sushi & Wagyu Temaki Sushi | Japan – $9.50

The eel has a slight edge simply because of the sauce, but they’re both outstanding. The rice is perfect. The servings are huge. The textures are balanced and so are the flavors, with a sweet/savory protein and a tangy pickle. There is no way either of these should be under $10 for the portion sizes and the quality of sushi that you’re getting. That is: enormous servings and outstanding quality.

Cheesesteak Macaroni and Cheese | Macatizers – $6.50

We’ve already written about this dish a couple of times, as it was a solid entry (with the rest of the booth) on Emile’s Fromage Montage and it also made our Best $50. The worst thing we can say about it is that when you put a cheesesteak on top of mac ‘n’ cheese, you won’t be hungry again for a while. But both components here are individually great, especially the cheesesteak with its classic flavors, and the combo is a winner.

What’s new on the menu that looks good to you? Have you tried anything that you think belongs on this list? Let us know in the comments!