by Beth Keating
Review
DisneyBizJournal.com
April 2, 2024
The last time we were at the Biergarten in EPCOT’S Germany pavilion, our oldest (now adult) son was just a preschooler, and he loved the place. He danced to his heart’s content to live music from an oompah band, and ate lots of hot dogs and mac and cheese. What wasn’t to love in a preschooler’s world?
Our younger child was not so fond of the “hot dog” or sausage style of food, eliminating Biergarten from our rotation for quite a while once he came along. On a recent trip to EPCOT, though, we opted to give the restaurant another whirl, as it was just my husband and I booking a dining package for a “Garden Rocks” concert.
The atmosphere at the eatery was even better than we’d remembered. The inside of the restaurant is themed to an old fashioned German biergarten at twilight. The room is on the darker side, but you’ll feel like you are outdoors at a festival, with quaint German balconied cottages encircling you on all sides.
The tiered tables surround a stage, where a very talented band performs periodic shows on a variety of instruments, including cow bells, a set of 14-foot (!) horns that are taller than the stage, an accordion, and more traditional brass and guitars. The singers invite guests, especially the children, to come out and dance on the decent sized dance floor. There were quite a few families taking advantage of the opportunity. A good time was being had by all, and the music was upbeat and energetic. Many guests were singing along to the tunes.
Biergarten is a buffet restaurant, with two nearly identical sides to the buffet. (Current costs are $49 for adults and $27 per child, with concert dining packages slightly higher). Lunch and dinner prices are the same, as the menu doesn’t change. The restaurant is not open for breakfast.
The salad bar portion of the buffet offered several kinds of cold salads, including macaroni, potato, and a tossed greens salad that you could add Ranch, or a particularly nice mustard dressing that was both tangy and sweet, a perfect complement to the darker greens. Go with the mustard dressing. The macaroni salad had that German salad zip to it, and the bar offered two types of German potato salad, the more familiar cold potato salad with the vinegar base, and the traditional warm potato salad. There were some of the usual salad bar residents, like cheese cubes, waiting, but there were also some less typical dishes being offered, including a cold bologna salad!
Don’t miss the mini pretzel bread. It was soft inside, with a nicely browned outer crust that had a touch of salt. Dining tip: use this bread to dip into your beer cheese soup for extra deliciousness.
The soup of the day on our visit was a beer cheese soup, a very sharp cheddar based soup with a distinct beer flavoring, and some dices of ham in the soup. The flavor was nice, but the soup was a touch on the salty side. It was better with the pretzel bread!
On the hot selections stretch of the buffet, there were several sausage selections, a bratwurst and a Regensburger Wurst, dished up alongside crunchy sauerkraut. Both wursts had that lovely “snap” to them, and were mildly seasoned, so if you aren’t accustomed to German sausages, don’t let these two options scare you. They aren’t overly spiced, and you’ll be familiar with the flavors.
On the center buffet stand was a tray of plain hot dogs, ostensibly for the kiddos, but we tried one anyway. It was a very German hot dog, with the more traditional seasonings, so make sure you aren’t expecting the usual Nathan’s style before you bite in. The hot dogs were good, as long as you were aware they were German-style, and not those typically found at the ballpark.
Oddly, we thought the best buffet item was something you wouldn’t typically think of as German – the meatballs were delicious! German meatballs, called Frikadelle (though there are more than a dozen variations on the German word for meatball, depending on region and style), are often served in a brown gravy, and the Biergarten meatballs were juicy, full of flavor and made with a very light touch. We went back for seconds on these.
The rotisserie chicken was moist and flavorful, but pretty much just a small piece of standard baked chicken. On the carving board, the roast of the day was a seasoned pork loin, which was pretty good, and offered alongside a quartet of different gravies and toppers.
We both grew up eating German sauerbraten, the German answer to pot roast. If it’s made the way your Oma used to make it, it takes days of marinating before being roasted low and slow in its own gravy. This sauerbraten was perhaps the most “sour” of the sauerbratens we’ve ever had, and while it was good, it was unexpected. This sauerbraten came on strong, and if you are familiar with the taste of the pickled red cabbage that sauerbraten is often served with, it had distinct undertones that were reminiscent of that red cabbage.
Spätzle is usually one of our favorite authentic German specialties, but the herbed spätzle here was so overly dry that it lacked any sort of noodle-like quality at all. Skip it. The potato pancakes, long a German tradition growing up, especially during Lent, were also pretty forgettable and on the dry side as well.
Also making the “too dry” list for this buffet was the salmon. Most of the time, it’s hard to keep salmon warm on a buffet without drying out as it sits under the heat lamps, but this was a whole slab of salmon that hadn’t had many guests slicing off sections yet, meaning that it came out of the kitchen pretty dry already, because it hadn’t had time to sit on the warming table.
The chicken schnitzel with a red wine sauce was better without the red wine sauce, but was still a pretty good facsimile of a plump chicken cutlet. The cutlet was coated in a crispy, yet lightly seasoned breading. This chicken was tasty, if a bit thicker than the schnitzels we’d been raised on.
The Nudel Gratin (the German version of mac and cheese, for those non-German speakers) was a plus. If you’ve eaten at the Germany pavilion booth at previous food & wine festivals, you are probably familiar with a version of this nudel gratin, and it’s always a crowd pleaser. This iteration was less oniony than the festival versions, but no less yummy. It’s a baked mac and cheese with a thick cap of melted cheddar across the top, the kind you cut into squares to serve. You won’t find the more liquid-y, creamy cheese here, but this gratin is a great addition to your plate.
Assorted desserts finished out the buffet, and we sampled the Apple Strudel, Bavarian Cheesecake and the Black Forest Cake, but there were a few other berry based options and the ubiquitous giant chocolate chip cookies as well.
The Bavarian cheesecake and Black Forest cake were both very light desserts, with the Bavarian cheesecake being an airy style closer to a whipped cheesecake in texture, and not overly sweet. There was also a thin layer of cake providing the structure to the fluffiness. These triangles are small, and we enjoyed them so much that we might have gone back for another one if we weren’t so full. The Black Forest was a petite rolled chocolate cake, also light in texture, with a scoop of jelled cherries in the center. Another nice dessert. The cookies were, well, standard buffet chocolate chip cookies. If you’ve had these kind of cookies in the past, you know what we mean. Maybe finish up with a slice of the apple strudel instead. It was an oval of large, sweet apple slices surrounded by an apple pie-like filling, and packed into a thin pastry shell. Our only suggestion on the apple strudel, having sampled many over the years, was that we would have liked a slightly thicker pastry crust. Either way, it was a nice, sweet treat to end the meal.
Of course, if you are celebrating year round Oktoberfest at a German biergarten, you’ll be inclined to lift up a giant mug of German beer (don’t worry, the band will let you know when it is time!). There’s a beer flight available ($16.75) with a set of four 5 ounce pours each, including the Beck's Pilsner; Warsteiner Dunkel; König Ludwig Weissbier; and Schöfferhofer Grapefruit Hefeweizen. You can choose 1/2 liter or liter versions of those brews as well. Those were some hefty looking mugs!
Beer not your thing? Germans are also known for some rather tasty wines, and there’s a German White Wine Flight (three pours, 2-ounces each) for $18.00, including a Villa Wolf Pinot Gris; J.H. Selbach Blue Label Riesling; and Valckenberg Madonna Riesling Spätlese. They are also available in full size glasses.
Overall, the buffet was just okay, not one that we’d rush right back for. If you are looking for an entertaining show with your meal, though, this might be the place to take the family. For the price point, it’s not a bad price by Disney buffet standards, and the ambiance was great. Prost!
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Beth Keating is a theme parks, restaurant and entertainment reporter for DisneyBizJournal.
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