Northern Bloom Menu & Food Review: Epcot Flower & Garden Festival

Northern Bloom is the Outdoor Kitchen in the Canada pavilion of World Showcase during the Epcot Flower & Garden Festival. In this Walt Disney World dining review, we’ll look at the menu prices, share food photos, and offer thoughts on what is worth your money.

Aside from Epcot’s Food & Wine Festival, the booth at Canada pavilion tends to be a perennial favorite for us. It’s perhaps a bit ironic that the Food & Wine Festival incarnation is our least favorite–both because that’s the true culinary event and also because that’s when this location is most popular thanks to serving up crowd-pleasing favorites from Le Cellier.

Canadian cuisine tends to be more ambitious outside of Epcot’s Food & Wine Festival, but no less approachable. Steak, seafood, decadent desserts, and surprisingly tasty novelty drinks are all the norm. The Northern Bloom Outdoor Kitchen is no exception to this trend. Let’s take a look…

We’ll start with a rundown of the Northern Bloom Outdoor Kitchen food menu:

• Seared Scallops with French Green Beans, Butter Potatoes, Brown Butter Vinaigrette and Apple-wood Smoked Bacon (GF)
• Beef Tenderloin Tips, Mushroom Bordelaise Sauce, Whipped Potatoes with Garden Vegetables (KA)
• Griddled Maple Pound Cake with Warm Peach Compote and Sweet Corn Gelato, featuring Burton’s Maple Syrup (KA)

Now our photos and reviews of each item…

Seared Scallops ($7) – These scallops are topped with brown butter vinaigrette and apple-wood smoked bacon, and accompanied by a generous portion of with french green beans along with a few butter potatoes. This dish follows one of the time-honored Epcot Festival Commandments: “leave the shrimp, take the salmon and scallops.”

The scallops are perfectly-prepared, with a light exterior crunch that gives away to a tender and flavorful interior. If that alone weren’t enough, the acidic vinaigrette mixes perfectly with the sweet and smoky bacon to provide the perfect sweet and tangy flavor. (It’s a lot like the buttermilk fried chicken about which I recently raved.) Highly recommended.

Beef Tenderloin Tips, Mushroom Bordelaise Sauce, Whipped Potatoes with Garden Vegetables ($6.75) – A couple pieces of our beef tenderloin tips were a tad overcooked and tough, but the majority were perfect. In any case, the abudant mushroom bordelaise sauce masked any deficiencies, and made this a strong dish.

Sure, it’s only a meat & potatoes (and carrots!) dish, but it’s well executed and delivers great value for money. We’d also recommend this dish.

Griddled Maple Pound Cake with Warm Peach Compote, Sweet Corn Gelato & Burton’s Maple Syrup ($4.75) – I’m not normally the biggest fan of pound cake, which I find to be a bit boring as desserts go. However, it’s perfect here as a foundation for some serious sweetness.

We don’t eat much sugar (and, like salt, find it to be overused at Walt Disney World), but neither of us found this to be over the top. Each element brought its own sweetness to the dish, much of it natural. The peach, sweet corn, and maple syrup flavors all meshed flawlessly. Sarah could’ve done without the popcorn, but I liked the texture that it added. We’d both highly recommend this and consider it one of the best desserts at Epcot’s Flower & Garden Festival.

Maple Popcorn Shake ($4.75) – I liked this, but Sarah was less of a fan. We both though the maple flavor could’ve been more prominent, which once again made me regret not carrying around my own bottle of maple syrup like my hero, Buddy the Elf.

As it stands, this is more like a “sweet vanilla” shake topped with popcorn than it is a Maple Popcorn Shake. The portion is also a bit small, but I’d nonetheless recommend it–just not as enthusiastically as anything else here.

Of course, there are plenty of options on the alcohol menu for Canada’s Outdoor Kitchen:

• Maple Popcorn Shake (non-alcoholic)
• Blonde Ale
• Blueberry Fruit Beer
• Apricot with Maple Syrup Blonde Ale
• Maple Popcorn Shake with maple rye whisky
• Beer Flight

Overall, the Northern Bloom Outdoor Kitchen at the Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival is a definite winner, with a stacked menu from top to bottom. Along with France’s booth, it’s one of the rare locations where we recommend ordering one of everything on the food menu. The Maple Popcorn Shake is the one “maybe” here, but even that is interesting enough that’s worth ordering. With several booths that are totally skippable, simply getting the whole menu here will be the efficient and satisfying approach.

Check out our Outdoor Kitchen Booth Menus & Food Photos at EPCOT International Flower & Garden Festival post if you want to see and read more about every menu this year. You’ll also want to read our full Guide to the EPCOT International Flower & Garden Festival before you go to get an idea of what to do, strategy for the festival, photos of the topiaries and floral displays, and much more!

Planning a Walt Disney World trip? Learn about hotels on our Walt Disney World Hotels Reviews page. For where to eat, read our Walt Disney World Restaurant Reviews. To save money on tickets or determine which type to buy, read our Tips for Saving Money on Walt Disney World Tickets post. Our What to Pack for Disney Trips post takes a unique look at clever items to take. For what to do and when to do it, our Walt Disney World Ride Guides will help. For comprehensive advice, the best place to start is our Walt Disney World Trip Planning Guide for everything you need to know!

YOUR THOUGHTS

What do you think of the Northern Bloom Outdoor Kitchen? Have you tried any of the food items at Canada’s booth? What did you like or dislike? Portion-size or quality-wise, did you have better or worse luck than us with what you ordered? Questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!