Review: Emile’s Fromage Montage at EPCOT’s 2025 Food & Wine Festival

If you’ve ever wanted to be rewarded for eating cheese, Emile’s Fromage Montage at EPCOT’s Food & Wine Festival should be in your plans. There are 9 dishes at 8 different outdoor kitchens on this year’s hunt and we tried them all.

How it Works

• Obtain a Festival Passport. They’re everywhere! You can find them at both the main and International Gateway entrances, at all EPCOT merch locations, and at every outdoor kitchen. Many of the Cast Members walking around will have them, too.
• Page 41 of the Passport shows you participating kitchens and qualifying dishes for the Montage. You’ll also see a little cheese symbol in the Passport and on the physical menu boards at the kitchens for items on the list.
• Purchase any combination of 5 items listed on page 41 to qualify for a free treat.
• When you are at the outdoor kitchen ordering your food, present the last page of your Passport to the Cast Member at the register. They will stamp the last page of your book with a special stamp showing you have completed that space.
• When you have 5 stamps, head to Shimmering Sips near Port of Entry to collect your treat.

When you get to Shimmering Sips, head straight to the window on the far left of the building. You don’t need to wait in the line to order food if you’re only redeeming your stamps. When you get to the window, hand the Cast Member your completed Passport and they will place the final “complete” stamp in the empty blue space. All that’s left is to wait for your prize!

The prize this year is a Key Lime and Vanilla DOLE Whip sundae in a plastic souvenir cup. This is especially nice since the heat and humidity are so intense.

The Cheese

In order to claim your sundae, you need the cheese! We ate it all and unless you’re planning to do the same, we have some recommendations on what to get and what to skip.

The best picks! The big cheeses, even! These two made our Best $50 You Can Spend at Food & Wine!

There are no wrong choices here as long as you’re trying both. Greece was a huge hit with our group this year not only because of the magical cheese dish pictured above, but because they also had our most highly rated drink of the entire Festival – the Greek Melon Limeade, $12.00. If you’re interested in reading more about the $347.20 we spent on alcohol this year, check out our Pour Decisions blog post!

The Pumpkin-Mascarpone Ravioli was fall in pasta and cheese form and it was a sweet and salty delight. We loved this last year and our devotion has not wavered. Try it and let us know what you think.

The Montage allows you to get either of the Warm Raclette dishes at the Alps outdoor kitchen and we got both. Unless you’re the person in your group in charge of procuring a table or trash can to dine on, please take a moment in line to admire the Raclette grill in action! The grill, pictured at the top of the board above, is heavily laden with a golden brick of Raclette Swiss Cheese. The stand keeps the cheese close to the grill so the Swiss slowly softens. When it’s just melted, a Cast Member will hold a boat filled with either baby potatoes and cornichons, or baby potatoes, cornichons, and Alpine ham under the edge of the cheese. When the boat is in position, the skilled Cast Member, basically a cheese conductor, scrapes the most liquid and oozy of the top layer off of the block and onto the waiting accompaniments. This is what makes a food festival! How neat to learn about different types of food preparation and then taste the results – and even get ice cream as a prize for eating said results!

While neither of these dishes made our Best $50, it’s not because we didn’t enjoy them. It’s simply because they have remained the same for the last few years and you don’t really need us to tell you that bread + cheese + potatoes + pickle = yes.

These two dishes are also returning favorites even though the cheesecake from Hawai’i has a fun new shape. It’s impossible to go wrong with either although the Schinkennudeln is heartier and more filling.

These 3 dishes are on our list of items to skip when completing Emile’s Fromage Montage. The Pāo de Queijo is exactly like the frozen ones you can get in a bag at Publix. They’re good but not worth festival money or time. The Basque Cheesecake was very nice but for sure not worth the money when there are other things on the list that are far better. We also didn’t love anything else at the Spain kitchen so standing in line for this one dish isn’t worth the effort. The Fall Fruit Cheesecake is our most favorite of the least favorites. It was good enough but if you’re getting something sweet from the Milled & Mulled kitchen, it really should be the Freshly Baked Carrot Cake, $5.00. The Butternut Squash and Ginger Bisque that made our Best $50 is at this spot, too, so don’t skip the kitchen – just don’t waste the money on the cheesecake.

Double Dip

We had varied experiences this year when trying to get multiple stamps at once. Because we were such a large group, we ordered two of every dish so that everyone could get a few bites. You can see from the stamps in our lead picture that the Milled & Mulled kitchen gave us 2 stamps for the 2 orders of ravioli we bought. Other kitchens told us that we were only allowed to have 1 stamp per kitchen, no matter how many of a single dish we ordered. We probably could have pushed the issue, but as Michael Jackson told Paul McCartney in The Girl is Mine, “I think I told you. I’m a (cheese) lover, not a fighter.”

Are you headed to EPCOT’s Food & Wine this year? Let us know if you’re planning to get your free cheese prize and which stamps you’ll acquire to get it done!