Spice Road Table:
We were enjoying the Figment scavenger hunt for the Festival of the Arts and had just completed our tour around the world when it was just about dinner time. We played our usual game of Canadian Roulette and lost. I’ll let DH fill you in on how that game is played. We had reserved seats for that night’s 6:45 broadway show (it was fantastic!) through our DVC membership so we had just enough time for a leisurely dinner. I checked the dining app and saw that Spice Road Table had an opening in the amount of time it would take us to walk from Canada to Morocco. Perfect! DS had fallen asleep back in France during the movie and was still asleep by the time we made it to the restaurant. We were seated in a lovely U shaped booth that turned out to be the best table possible for us. I was able to lay DS down on the bench to continue sleeping. We decided that we would just order food for him when he woke up. That kid was so tuckered out that he didn’t wake up until we were leaving the restaurant.
DS passed out in the booth
Ah, Canadian roulette. Once every generation there comes a dining location that is so… let’s call it trendy. A place so trendy that it’s impossible to get any kind of reservation in the restaurant unless you book at phone tree opening at the first possible day and you promise a first born child to somebody. For my generation, that place is Le Cellier, the steakhouse in the Canada pavilion. It seems to be treated with the same level of reverence as the Chef’s table at Victoria & Albert’s. Because DW and I are very contrarian about these things, we decided long ago that the best way to deal with this would be to never try to obtain a reservation. Instead, we have developed a game we like to call Canadian roulette. The rules of this game are quite simple: without a reservation, walk up to the podium and inquire about dinner for the night with your party. In this case, it was a party of five. Much like in the Russian version of the game, you have a statistically inferior possibility of there being availability. Unlike in the Russian version, the winner gets to eat steak. Or soup. Or whatever they serve at the place (for all I know, it’s a salad bar full of cleverly prepared turnips). Needless to say, we’ve never won this game. But some day (perhaps when the mantle of ‘most difficult restaurant to get in to’ passes to the Taste of Soul Eggroll truck) we expect there’s a chance we will earn a hard won victory and will enjoy the food first hand.
Alas, as DW stated, it was not meant to be on this trip. One of the more delightful parts of losing at Canadian roulette is seeing how the cast member treats your losing cause. I believe I was laughed at once when I asked, but mostly people get a sad look in their eyes that says ‘this poor unfortunate soul didn’t even pretend to plan for this trip. I am weeping on the inside as to how ill-informed he must be to think there is availability any time within the next month or more. And now I hope he doesn’t make a scene and start yelling because that would be awful’. This time, I was given sage advice about downloading the Disneyworld app, which would tell me if there were any reservations anywhere in the World. Good advice, by the way.
While I was betting on red at Le Cellier, DW and everyone else were trying to figure out what they wanted to do for reals. One of our big standby places is restaurant Marrakesh. It is really good, but we wanted to try something new and different. Fortunately, the Spice Road showed up as having availability so we booked a table on the app and immediately headed over to get seated. Fun tip: just because you booked 5 minutes or so before you showed up doesn’t mean the restaurant knows that you have a reservation. They had the reservations printed out, so we naturally weren’t on the list. Just something to keep in mind if you try doing something like that. It wasn’t a problem, they just looked us up on the computer and we were on our way to eat. And more importantly, get something to drink. We were thirsty.
First up was deciding on drinks. They had a couple of cool sounding drinks for the kids so we ordered one of each. They came out in to go cups with lids which worked out great since DS obviously didn’t drink any of his while we were there. We took those to go with us when we left. DD had the Watermelon Delight Fruit Cocktail-watermelon, cranberry juice, and orange water. DS had the Moroccan Sunrise-pineapple, strawberry juice and orange water. Both wre very refreshing. I ordered a red sangria that I enjoyed, GM ordered a red wine of some sort, and DH orders the Tangiers Breeze-peach vodka, midori and pineapple juice. I think we were all happy with our drinks.
DD's Watermelon Delight
My sangria
Red wine and Tangiers Breeze.
As I had mentioned a long time ago during the tea post, there are times when your child goes comatose and sleeps the whole time. This did not phase our server guy at all. He was really great with both the adults and the remaining child. We got our drink orders in and he brought us much needed water. As we were obviously at the park with children, he gave us some advice for good ways to go through the park and attractions that he recommended. I thought that was very cool of him.
The Tangiers Breeze had a very nice peach overtone, and the pineapple sugar cut the alcohol so that it wasn’t just like I was drinking vodka. For those of you who don’t know, ‘flavored vodka’ usually isn’t really in the sweet category, it just has overtones of the flavoring. Kind of like 100% cocoa chocolate. You’re not going to get around the fact that you are drinking vodka. So, the pineapple brought that back to earth. I also thought the midori (lime-ish liquer, right?) helped act as a bridge to bring the peach and pineapple together so that ‘shock of vodka with peach essence’ could travel across the chasm to ‘really really acidic sugar blast’. For fun, we will call that bridge ‘sweet sour boulevard’. I liked it. Then I drank it really fast and wanted 12 more.
DD ordered the kids beef slider with fries and hummus with carrots. She asked for cheese after it was already brought to the table. She led us to believe she wasn’t going to touch it without cheese. Our waiter was doubtful they’d have cheese appropriate for the slider but he delivered a lovely slice of orange cheese on a plate for her and she was very happy. She enjoyed her slider a lot. I don’t think we were able to get her to try the hummus. Typical. The rest of us enjoyed it though.
DW understated the intensity with which DD asserted her need for yellow square cheese. It was a little bit embarrassing, really. But again, our guy was super cool about adding child cheese to a very nice looking slider. No idea where he got it from, but Disney magic works that way, I suppose. The hummus was very good.
Hummus with carrots, slider, fries
We decided to share a few plates of the tapas style items. This was our first visit to Spice Road, so we asked our waiter if he thought our order would work out for the three of us or if we had ordered way too much or way too little. We ordered the Hummus and Imported Olives, Rice Stuffed Grape Leaves, Spicy Garlic Shrimp, and Harissa Chicken Roll. We each picked one tapas and the hummus was just the given choice that we had to get.
Tapas is the kind of food that was made for EPCOT, where you want to eat everything but don’t want to eat ALL of anything because there are so many places to cover.
This is what all of the food looks like. I'll have close ups of each below.
The hummus comes with cornichons and za’atar pita bread. Yes, I had to goodle “cornichons”…small pickled cucumber. Ah. Yes, hiding under all of the olives. The hummus was great. It came with standard hummus as well as a sun dried tomato hummus. Both had wonderful flavor. I think I’m usually inclined to like flavored hummus more just because I eat standard , regular old hummus more than any other flavor of hummus. I think we did have a problem getting the pita bread to last through all of the hummus. I’m an olive fan and these olives didn’t disappoint. My mom pointed out that I was taking all of the green olives (my favorite), though I wasn’t doing it on purpose. They just happened to be on the corner closest to my seat when I scooped them up.
The lovely hummus spread and olives
The rice stuffed grape leaves also had fried capers, raisins, and nutmeg. As their name implies they were stuffed with rice. I think this one was my choice just to get something out of the ordinary from what we usually eat. They were tasty. Not my favorite of the meal but still pretty good.
Stuffed grape leaves, as it turns out, have a bit of a sour/bitter taste to them. Not in a bad way, just that’s how they taste. Maybe a bit like olives, but they’re not olives. They’re leaves stuffed with stuff. I liked them a lot, and I was glad I tried them. I would not have wanted an entire meal of them though, which is the beauty of tapas. I get to dabble in the leaf stuffed with things world, while also enjoying shrimp and hummus.
The grapes leaves on the top and pita bread on the bottom
GM’s choice was the spicy garlic shrimp. It’s sautéed shrimp with dried chilies and fried garlic. You know the drill now, I’m not a big fan of shrimp but I enjoyed it. I love garlic so this was a hit. I’m not into super spicy things and I don’t recall this registering much heat so if you are into super spicy this won’t cut it. If you aren’t into spicy things give it a shot. We’ll see if DH’s memory is different on this than mine. Though he tolerates spicy WAY better than me and loves hot things. So I imagine he’ll agree with me.
The funny part is that I didn’t remember the shrimp was supposed to be spicy. It was good, and as DW said the garlic was very nice. But no, I don’t remember registering any sense of ‘this is supposed to be hot’. So for you culinary daredevils out there looking to show how awesome you are at tolerating Chernobyl hot shrimp here, move along. I did like the shrimp though. I believe I distinctly remember thinking to myself that I need to make shrimp at home and use tons of garlic, because there’s no better way… unless it’s in a brunch bloody Mary.
Shrimp on the top and the chicken roll on the bottom
Lastly we have my DH’s choice, the Harissa chicken roll with spicy ketchup. From the menu this was the one I was least looking forward so naturally it was my favorite! I wish we had ordered another. It was difficult sharing the two pieces three ways, but we made it work somehow. I’m going to have to rely heavily on DH’s memory here to help describe the dish. Typically I have the better memory in general but he seems to always remember food better. I just remember that it was delicious and I wanted more.
I would like to say that I have a way better memory, but only when it matters. You know… food, trigonometry acronyms, and that third thing I’m really good at remembering... I forget what that is, but you get the idea.
The harissa chicken, as you can see in the picture, looks a lot like an eggroll. And it’s a big one, possibly on the scale of the eternally plugged Taste of Soul. I swear I don’t even really have an eggroll fixation, that’s just how these reviews are starting to stack up. The funny thing to me is that DW makes something similar to this. A few years ago, she ended up with a recipe for southwest eggrolls, where you put corn, peppers, and other southwest things together with a southwest blend of spices. You wrap them up in a wonton wrapper and bake them in the oven (we don’t have a fry station). This was much like those, but with the addition of chicken. We are generally too lazy to cook with meat. As DW says, splitting one eggroll that has been cut in half between three people is a little problematic. But it’s worth it. Oh, and this had a more Mediterranean spice combination instead of the southwest flavors.
This meal overall impressed me with an interesting observation, the meat dish was the least easy to share. If you’re not insistent on eating meat (you don’t really care one way or the other), you can get some really good and creative dishes by getting non-meat dominant items. This might not be a shocker for most people, but I hadn’t thought about it much. I did know if you get a vegetable pizza at some restaurants, you are in for a super treat because they’re boss awesome. Other than that, I hadn’t thought.
I really enjoyed our experience here. We had a lovely booth overlooking the water. Our dinner was right at the beginning of dinnertime so hardly anyone was there…nice and quiet. We were able to enjoy a bunch of different things without being stuck with just one meal. I really like the tapas style of dinner. We’ll definitely come back and try some more items. Our server was really friendly and offered up other tips for us about the parks in general with kids since he has a daughter near our daughter’s age. The best part though was the big booth for DS to finish his marathon nap. I mean, he slept through three countries BEFORE we headed to dinner. I was just thankful I didn’t have to hold him while he was sleeping throughout dinner. Hands free! Yay! Side note: this was the only day that we didn’t go back to the hotel for a midday break or leave the parks early, hence the long nap.
Agreed, very good experience. I know it’s not ‘actually hot’ at this time of year, but I was on the hot side when we went to dinner. I really appreciated the A/C that came with the primo view of the EPCOT water view. I believe there is an outside area too and it’s shaded (getting out of the sun was probably all I really needed), but we were inside and it was heavenly.