Our Family’s New Favorite EPCOT Eatery: A Meal for Three for About $25

Move over Les Halles Boulangerie & Patisserie and Sunshine Seasons, our family has a new #1 counter service restaurant at EPCOT. Technically, it’s more like a quasi-quick service or whatever the fast food equivalent of tapas is considered. Maybe a Global Marketplace on steroids, in a permanent location with actual tables and chairs as opposed to trash cans, short lines inside, and satisfying cuisine. This EPCOT eatery truly has it all!

EPCOT enjoys a reputation as the culinary epicenter of Walt Disney World. Despite that, our potentially controversial opinion is that the park has a relatively weak lineup of counter service restaurants. There are some gems and locations with a couple of great entrees, but few with robust menus.

The argument could be made when looking just at quick service options that Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, and maybe even Magic Kingdom are all better. Where EPCOT excels is table service, snack stands, bakeries, and of course, festival food. This can be a problem if you just want an efficient and affordable meal.

The problem also arises when you visit during Diet EPCOT, or the stretches between festivals (coming up again during Thanksgiving week, prior to EPCOT’s Festival of the Holidays starting on November 27, 2026). With festival season shrinking back to 2019 normal, there are longer gaps throughout the year when food booths aren’t open. During those, your choices are mostly mediocre counter service or more expensive and time-consuming table service restaurants.

Even during festivals, you might not want to break the bank grazing around the world, and would prefer a more satisfying meal for a fair price. Beyond spending the money to do so, you may not want to spend the time on festivals. Food booth lines, especially on weekends, can be prohibitively long, and you could easily wait in line over 30 minutes at a few booths to assemble the equivalent of a single meal.

Enter Tangierine Cafe: Flavors of Medina, which is a restaurant in the Morocco pavilion of World Showcase, and straddles the line between food booth at the various EPCOT festivals and counter service restaurants. Regardless of how it’s categorized by Walt Disney World, it has all of the hallmarks of a real restaurant as opposed to a food booth.

It’s a permanent venue with indoor and outdoor seating, and it maintains operating hours from 11 a.m. until 9 p.m. even during the upcoming gap between Food & Wine and the 2026 EPCOT Festival of the Holidays. The reason that it’s so different from other food booths is rather simple: it used to be a counter service restaurant run by a third party.

For those who are unfamiliar with it, Tangierine Cafe was once a top 5 counter service restaurant in all of Walt Disney World, and routinely topped lists of best uses of Disney Dining Plan credits. When the parks reopened following the COVID closure, the location was open for a few days before closing as its operator faced financial woes. After a relatively brief saga, Walt Disney World took over operations of the pavilion, its retail and restaurants.

Walt Disney World overhauled the menu of Spice Road Table, and made a number of other changes to increase that location’s popularity. Imagineering has also gone through Morocco, making a variety of aesthetic and design changes. Some have been improvements, whereas others have undeniably cheapened the original detail of the pavilion (the new tile around the fountains and planters is borderline egregious). Meanwhile, Restaurant Marrakesh remains mostly shuttered, used only sporadically as a lounge.

In any case, this background explains how Tangierine Cafe is both a counter service restaurant and a food booth. This is really why it’s more like a counter tapas restaurant, given the combination of a counter service venue but portion sizes that are closer to festival food.

From our perspective, this is perfect. We can order multiple dishes at Tangierine Cafe: Flavors of Medina, share them amongst our family, and make a full meal of it for $20 to $25. That’s for all three of us, not per person.

Between the reasonable pricing, convenient seating, delicious cuisine, and one addictively good dessert–arguably top 5 in all of Walt Disney World–we found ourselves returning to Tangierine Cafe again and again during our two most recent trips.

Here’s the food menu for Tangierine Cafe: Flavors of Medina right now:

• Chermoula Chicken Hummus Bowl with apricot chutney and grilled shishito peppers served with pita
• Spiced Flank Steak Hummus Bowl with harissa yogurt and roasted peppers served with pita
• Ras el Hanout Cauliflower Bowl with chickpea salad, golden raisin relish, and parsley served with pita (plant-based)
• Plant-based Falafel Wrap with tomato-cucumber relish and garlic sauce served on warm Moroccan flatbread (plant-based)
• Chocolate-Pistachio Cookie
• Fig Cocktail — Kleiner Feigling Fig Liqueur and white cranberry juice
• Carib Brewery Honey & Fig Dream Hard Cider
• Keel Farms Golden Apple Chai Hard Cider
• Keel Farms Goji Berry Citrus Hard Cider
• Hard Cider Flight

This is technically the menu for the 2026 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival, and is thus subject to change in one month when the 2026 EPCOT Festival of the Holidays starts. However, it is rare for that to happen. Actually, I can’t think of a single time when the menu at Tangierine Cafe has changed between the two events.

To the contrary, the old menu of grilled kebabs had basically been the same since 2021, with only minor changes here and there, such as a new flatbread or dessert added for the various festivals. But the bulk of the menu was unchanged for all events up until the 2026 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival, when the grilled kebabs were replaced with the new bowls. And as much as we enjoyed the kebabs before, this is by and large a positive change.

Let’s dig into the new dishes and dessert at Tangierine Cafe: Flavors of Medina…

We’ll start with the new Chermoula Chicken Hummus Bowl with Apricot Chutney and Grilled Shishito Peppers served with Pita for $6.79.

This is Sarah’s favorite “entree” on the menu at Tangierine Cafe. Buried under the pile of fresh veggies is tender and flavorful grilled chicken. The apricot chutney enhances the flavor, and the portion of hummus is hearty.

It’s a healthy dish, and also a fairly hefty one despite its smaller size and price tag. If you have a smaller appetite, you could likely make a meal out of this. It comes close for Sarah, but she prefers to order another bowl for us to share.

That shared bowl is the plant-based Ras el Hanout Cauliflower Bowl with Chickpea Salad, Golden Raisin Relish, and Parsley served with Pita for $6.49. This is considered a reimagined 30th Anniversary dish, dating back to 2003 according to Walt Disney World. I don’t recall ever trying it in the past, so it was presumably gone by the time we started covering Food & Wine annually.

This dish swaps out meat for cauliflower, which is not normally a trade I’d make. The cauliflower is abundant and well-seasoned, giving the dish an ever-so-slight bit of kick. Otherwise, it’s a very similar idea to the chicken bowl above. In general, this bowl is fine.

If it were the only option of its kind at Tangierine Cafe, we’d recommend it rather enthusiastically, but neither of us preferred this to the chicken or steak bowls. It’s a great option if you need something plant-based that’s real food, but otherwise, you might opt for one of the meaty alternatives instead.

Our final new dish is the Spiced Flank Steak Hummus Bowl with Harissa Yogurt and Roasted Peppers served with Pita for $7.29.

If you ask me, this is easily the best of the bunch. That harissa yogurt paired with the spiced steak are a veritable symphony of flavors, with the meat having a bit of kick that’s cooled by the yogurt. The steak is shockingly tender for a location like this, and the price point. Oh, and vegetables and hummus are also involved, rounding out the dish nicely. But for me, it’s all about the steak and yogurt.

It’s also amazing to me that it costs under $1 more than the cauliflower bowl, as it’s much more filling. Sarah was less impressed by the steak bowl; while she conceded that the steak was very good, she actually preferred the chicken. She was also less enamored with the dish being slathered in harissa yogurt, as apparently the whole reason we ate here was to have a healthier meal.

Note that the menu also carries over a Plant-based Falafel Wrap that debuted last year, if I recall correctly. I didn’t particularly care for it then, so we stuck to the bowls during our meals at Tangierine Cafe in September and October 2026.

Finally, there’s the new Chocolate-Pistachio Cookie for $4.29.

The first time we ate at Tangierine Cafe: Flavors of Medina, we skipped this cookie. After all, we were allegedly eating here for a healthy meal. Wow, what a mistake that was! The Chocolate-Pistachio Cookie is essentially a Dubai chocolate bar in cookie form.

There are a lot of good desserts at the various festivals, but this is #1 for us in all of EPCOT right now. That’s in the entire park, including food booths, counter service, and even table service (although we admittedly haven’t tried all of the current options at sit-down restaurants).

The cookie itself is a rich chocolate, filled with pistachio cream. The filling is salty and nutty, offering the perfect contrast against that sweet chocolate cookie. The cookie is soft, with the pistachio pieces and chocolate exterior adding a nice crunch. The pistachio flavor isn’t too strong, but it is a noticeably pistachio-flavored dessert.

All in all, it’s the perfect marriage of textures, plus sweet and savory flavors, all in one decadent dessert. Sarah really, really loves this cookie, finding it to be more on the subtle side, as opposed to the typically overly-indulgent and artificial Walt Disney World desserts. She drew a comparison to Gideon’s, calling this a similar idea but much more restrained and less of an exercise in excess. She actually likes this better than those over-the-top cookies!

As much as I love the Chocolate-Pistachio Cookie at Tangierine Cafe and will absolutely order it again (and again), I’ll still take the monstrosities at Gideon’s over this. I can see why she’d prefer it, though; it’s definitely a fantastic option for anyone wanting a rich and indulgent dessert with a bit more nuance, and it’s nice to have a treat like this that’s decadent while still being on the lighter side (by Walt Disney World standards).

Another advantage offered by Tangierine Cafe is that it serves food that our toddler likes, and that we’re comfortable with her eating. It can be very difficult to find healthy kids meals at Walt Disney World, but the easiest park is EPCOT (far and away).

That’s especially true during festival season as every booth entree is essentially specializing in kids meals, and there are a lot of grilled meats and vegetables. It’s more difficult during Diet EPCOT or in the evening when Sunshine Seasons is closed. Up until now, our best option has been La Cantina de San Angel, which is the most expensive counter service at EPCOT.

We’ve found that La Cantina de San Angel is a gamble, as our daughter might arbitrarily decide she no longer likes the $16 bowl she loved the previous day. And a second bowl that also used to be a huge hit might no longer suffice as an alternative. Suddenly, we’re down over $30 with nothing eaten, before discovering that a side of beans and guacamole are the magic order.

By contrast, we can just order all three of the bowls at Tangierine Cafe, and our daughter can pick and choose what she likes from each. Everything about this place is lower stakes, and that’s a huge asset when dining with a toddler in World Showcase.

Ultimately, Tangierine Cafe: Flavors of Medina is a huge winner for our family. It’s Sarah’s favorite restaurant or whatever you want to call it, and also our daughter’s (although she really liked a few of the booths in Harvest Hollow and Flavors from Fire). Tangierine Cafe is not #1 for me, but it’s certainly up there and has a lot of selling points that are difficult to overlook if you want an easy and efficient meal at EPCOT.

The location is tucked away and overlooked by most guests, making the lines short and ordering a breeze–quite the contrast to some nearby food booths, like France, that had long lines in the sun. There’s plenty of covered seating, so you don’t have to stand over a trash can to enjoy your meal. The menu offers both healthy dishes to a bit more indulgent ones, along with one of the best desserts in all of Walt Disney World.

As much as we loved and still miss the “old” Tangierine Cafe, the ‘Flavors of Medina’ version is better for our current circumstances as a young family. Whereas we could’ve easily dropped $35 to $40 there before (just like La Cantina de San Angel), we can now spend $25 for a full meal and leave mostly satisfied. While I still might be hungry, that’s what the poutine on the other side of the lagoon is for, and now I don’t have to feel so guilty about ordering it after having a healthier first course!

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Your Thoughts

If you’ve tried any of the new bowls at Tangierine Cafe: Flavors of Medina, what did you think? Portion-size or quality-wise, what was or was not worth the money? Do you agree or disagree with our food reviews? 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!