Thursday nights dinner plan was to head to Teppan Edo. After the disappointment at the Biergarten (based solely on our family moods) I was ready for a great dinner in Japan.
We left early enough to have time to wander around and made sure we had a full tour of Japan before heading into dinner. I think Japan may be one of my favourite Epcot countries. There is so much to see and even in the midst of crowd chaos it still feels so peaceful.
Here are a couple of photos. The second photo is a scrim that fronts some beautiful origami cranes.
Our supper at Teppan Edo was amazing. Loved the whole experience. You are seated at tables for 8, so if your party is smaller you will be sharing a table with others. We shared with a quiet couple and three women who I believe were all part of the Disney College program. There wasnt much interaction between the three groups, but it was a pleasant table to eat with. Our chef was entertaining, but he was younger and clearly most interested in the three women and took every opportunity to talk and flirt with them. It was amusing to watch.
For those who havent been there before, here is how the meal works. You are seated and they take your drink order. Next up they take your dinner order. When the chef comes out, he brings a cart which is prepared with the ingredients needed to make each meal. You get to watch him heating up the veggies and cooking up the different meat/seafood options and he serves the food as it is cooked. My son and I had the steak and I think my husband had a steak or chicken plus shrimp meal. The food was so tasty definitely a meal I dream of eating again someday. As they cook up the food, the chefs carry on some fun banter and try to make the cooking into a bit of a show.
In this picture, the chef at the other table was stacking up the onions to make them into a steaming volcano.
Our chef made the onions into a steam train and was pushing them across the grill making choo, choo noises.
There is just enough banter and fun to keep everyone amused throughout the prep.
After dinner, it was another beautiful night out and we slowly strolled around taking some pictures along the way. It was great to be there during the F&G festival but the crowds made it difficult to take great pictures of the displays. The Mater and McQueen display we really nice, but the picture below is about as good as I could get since the crowds were so thick.
On the way out of WS, we took some time to enjoy one more GG slushie, since our trip was soon coming to an end.
When we got back to the YC, we decided it was a good evening to check out the movie on the beach. They were showing Emperors New Groove which is one of our favourites so we all settled in for a bit.
Here are some shots of what it looks like to watch the movie, and some of the other views from our beach chairs. It was such a gorgeous night to just sit outside for a bit.
After watching the movie we headed back to the CL lounge for dessert and watched Wishes from our balcony. All in all, it was a great day.
There was one odd CL interaction this day that I should tell you about. By this time in our trip we were starting to tire of our structured meals and wanted to enjoy one more casual counter service meal, so we needed to cancel one of our ADRs. We had a day and a half left, with plans on Friday to head to Big River Grill for lunch and Raglan Road for supper, and Saturday lunch was booked for the Rose and Crown. Since all three were pubs we thought we should cancel the lunch on Friday and leave that open to have some counter service in Epcot.
We weighed our options:
- Cancel Big River Grill my husband loves this place and didnt want to cancel. Im neutral on it, and would have been fine cancelling, but was also happy to go since he really wanted it.
- Cancel Raglan Road no way! Our ADR was the day before St. Patricks Day and there was no way we were missing that meal.
- Cancel Rose and Crown this was one we were wanting for sentimental reasons. We have been to the R&C on all of our trips to WDW so it feels like tradition. We also go there because the R&C is our pub at home (see picture below). We live down the street from the R&C and are there at least once a week. It seemed like we couldnt spend a week being so close to the R&C without going at least once.
In the end, we chose to cancel the R&C ADR and move the Big River Grill ADR from Friday to Saturday. Since we were staying CL, we asked them to make the changes for us. I forget who we were talking to, but she was one of the staff that seemed to know more than the others, but she said she couldnt help us with the Big River ADR. She said she could cancel the R&C and Big River ADRs but she couldnt book an ADR for the Big River, since they didnt take ADRs. I explained that the IPO was able to book ADRs at Big River, so I didnt understand why she couldnt. She said that IPO is able to book some things that the CL staff cant.
Even if she cant book the ADR directly, why couldnt she have called over to the IPO to ask them to do it? It didnt really matter since Big River is easy to get into as a walk up, but I still could not understand why she couldnt get us an ADR. It just struck us as weird that the CL team couldnt help us with this simple request.
Well thats enough prattling on for one day. Next up, our last full day.