A Review of Teppan Edo Hibachi at EPCOT

In this week's episode, Jared reviews his dining experience at Teppan Edo at EPCOT and gives recommendations on where to dine in the park. 

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On this week's episode of A Dryer Dose of Disney, Jared reviews one of the most popular restaurants at EPCOT. Intro Music Welcome to this week's episode of a Dryer Dose of Disney. I'm your host, Jared dryer. And today we are going to be talking about. Teppan Edo, the hibachi style restaurant over at Epcot. And I know that this is a very popular restaurant. A lot of people want to know what it's like to eat there, what the experience is and today we're going to be sharing that with you. So we're going to have a lot of fun as we talk about Epcot and all the cool foods to eat over there and the best restaurants. But we're going to focus specifically in the land of Japan and the hibachi restaurant today. But before we dive into that, do want to do a couple of quick housekeeping items. Wherever you're listening to us, or if you're watching us on YouTube, if you can find the pause button and then go find that subscribe button. 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You can find the link down there and support our show through different tiered levels, but know that at our top tier, we have our absolute best Disney tip or trick ever. And that's only available to our exclusive top tier members because it's that good of a trick. So you're definitely going to want to check that out. And then we have our, I can do this all day tip of the day gear which I show over my shoulder here behind me. We've got bags, shirts, coats of. iPhone cases, all kinds of cool things. But it's a really cool logo because it has the captain America shield that says I can do this all day and it's got the castle in the middle. So that's a really cool element that we designed for this podcast. So definitely go check that out at our Etsy shop. Those are down in the description below. And finally, before we go into it, if you're traveling down to Orlando and you are looking forward to the best place to stay. The dryer dose of Disney has a condo you can stay at, and we do have links for both VRBO and Airbnb in our description below. And we've got some availability this year, so it's a great time. To go check that out and see our three bedroom, two bath condo. It's cheaper than staying at a hotel. Everybody gets their own room. It's decorated like Disney. Like you can see behind me here, and it's not too far away. It's only two exits from the Disney parks. So you're definitely going to want to go check that out. So with that, let's dive right into it today. We are going to be talking about Epcot and Teppan Edo the hibachi restaurant over there. And before I get specifically to that restaurant, I do want to share, we love Epcot. And in fact, Epcot is one of our most favorite parks for multiple reasons. Primarily due to the diverse food that's going to be found throughout the entire park and that combined with the cool festivals. So if you've listened to our other episodes, you know that they do four festivals there a year. They do the fine arts festival at the beginning of the year, followed by the flower and garden festival in the fall. They do the food and wine one, which is probably the most popular one. And then right at the holiday season, they do the holiday festival. It's a great opportunity to go to the same parks and get a different experience through all the festivals and during the festivals, you're also going to have all the carts and all the kiosks throughout the entire park that have different types of food. Based on whatever the theme is for that year. So we definitely encourage you to go check it out. But because we're talking about Epcot today, we thought we'd start with the fact that Epcot is our favorite food park. We love just the, like I said, the diverse foods that are there, we love trying all the different samples. And the best part is, as you go to all these different kiosks throughout the park, it's not going to break the bank. Most of the dishes you're going to try are going to be in the five to $10 range. And you can definitely share the little bites with your family. And then if you do that a lot, obviously through the whole world showcase, you'll be pretty full by the time you get through it. So I say all that to say, we don't always eat at the restaurants at the park that we have done quite a few. And I'll recap those here in just a moment. I will say that if you go through the festivals and you do all the food through the festival, Chances are as you're going to be pretty full anyway. So you may not always need to do. A reservation for a big sit-down restaurant. But if you do Teppan Edo. It is definitely a great choice to do that with now at Epcot, they do have a ton of different restaurants there. I encourage you to go check them all out online. And they do have different restaurants for different lands around the world showcase. And we have eaten in Mexico. We've eaten in Norway. We have eaten at obviously Teppan Edo. Now in Japan, we've eaten at colonial America. We've eaten in Italy. We've eaten in Canada. We have eaten over at the land pavilion at the garden grill. So we've tried so many of those including then the newest one is space 220, which is very popular. That's also top tier restaurant that everyone's trying to get, and that one's fantastic as well over by the mission space. So, many different restaurant opportunities. We encourage you go check them all out. And I will say that not any of them disappointed us. There are some that are definitely better than the others. And we'll talk about that at the end of the episode today. But. I will say at the end of the day, they're all good. They're all exciting. They're all a lot of fun. They all have their own unique elements to them. Like in Mexico, you're eating inside the Aztec ruin over there where the. Three Caballeros is with Donald and you get to see the ride similar to the blue Bayou out at Disney land. So that's really cool to be in that type of atmosphere. And then about space 220, they have the aquarium restaurant over at the living sea. So a lot of really cool opportunities to get a different environment, not only with your food. So we encourage you to check all those out. But like I said, this hibachi restaurant is definitely at the top of most people's lists and they definitely want to try it out. Because we had wanted to try it out for so long. We decided to do that for our anniversary this year in July. And we got a reservation about 60 days out. So it wasn't difficult to get do know that as you get closer, it does become much, much more difficult. And if you have difficulty finding a reservation for a restaurant, you like, we do recommend our friends over at mouse dining, which is down in the description below. And with Mouse Dining, you can set alerts. So these are the days I'm going to be at which parks. And this is the restaurant I'm trying to get. And if any reservations pop open during your alerts time. So you could say like lunch or dinner, then you'll get a text alert that says, Hey, one just opened up for a party, your size. And if you go in really quick and I do mean you have to go in very, quickly. Cause that's how we got our space. 220 a reservation. You have to go very quickly in there, but you can claim that reservation through the, my Disney experience app and then hopefully secure that for you and your family. So we do want to encourage you, go check out mouse dining because of that. But we did get a reservation. It wasn't difficult doing it 60 days out. Like I said, as you get closer, that does become much more difficult and it is fully reserved out. So there's very little opportunity to go day of, they may be able to squeeze the, and I always encourage you if you want to try, always ask, but There could always be a challenge with that. Okay. So Teppan Edo is a hibachi style restaurant, which means it's the type of restaurant where the cooking staff is going to cook your meal for you at your table. So they have a flat top griddle. That they're going to cook everybody at the tables food at, and it's a really cool experience because you get to see the chefs in action. And of course they like to have a lot of fun with it. So it's very entertaining. If in your hometown, you have a Bennhannahs or a Mount Fuji. It's very similar to that. I'm sure you could go on Google and search a hibachi style restaurant in your area, and you'd probably find some, so you may be familiar with this style of restaurant already, but it's really cool to do that over at Epcot. Of course they have the traditional types of food that you're going to find at a hibachi restaurant. So you're going to have access to your steak, your chicken, your shrimp, calamari other different types of sushi rolls are available there as well. So a lot of good things that you can try at this restaurant if you've never tried Japanese cuisine. So we highly recommend get a little bit out of your comfort zone. Try something a little bit new. We did get the calamari to start off for meal, and that was absolutely fantastic. And one of the highlights of the meal. So I definitely recommend that. We also got a couple alcoholic drinks. They were good. They were a little bit of a heavy pour. And as when you're out there at the parks walking around all day and it can get awfully hot out there during the summer, you may be a little dehydrated. You're on an empty stomach. You sit down, you drink a little bit of a heavy pour. You're definitely going to feel it. So we each had one drink and that was pretty much our limit for that meal. And that's all we wanted to do, but they were good. We tried a couple of different styles of drinks and both were fantastic. So I can definitely recommend the alcoholic beverages were there. Like we said, you're then going to pick your normal course, and then they're going to bring out the chef. Who's going to cook. What they do is they do the Udon noodles instead of fried rice. So that was a little bit of a difference from what we've seen here in Colorado, when we've gone to our hibachi restaurants is normally we get fried rice, but there they do Udon noodles. In addition to your mail with white rice. So they'll get all that cooked up for you, and then you can watch them as they play with their tongs and spatulas. And they're flipping things around and they do all the cool little sideshow type gags that you can do on a flat top cooking surface. So they had a lot of fun with it. At our table, there were eight people that's normal for hibachi restaurant and with Disney being completely reserved out, you will be sitting with other people. So we do want you to be aware of that if especially if you're in a smaller group. know, that there could be another large group sitting with you. And then likewise flip side of the coin. If you're a large group, say you have six people. They will sit you with another couple though you will be dominating the table for the most part. Now for my meal, I did get the. Shrimp with the steak. And that was fantastic. They do have some sauces. You can dip them in. It was very, tasty. They do bring up the ginger salad if you've never had that at a restaurant. They bring that out as a starter. That was also very good. But for the most part, the food was very typical to what we would experience at any other hibachi restaurant. Back home here in Denver, because we do have a few of them here in town. So we had a chance to try those all out. My wife she got the chicken and the steak, and then my daughter just got the plain chicken. We all agreed that the, meal was very good. We were full when we left. It tasted wonderful. The Udon noodles are thicker noodle, so you're not your typical lo mein that you may get at a Chinese food restaurant. These are thicker noodles, a traditional to the Japanese style. And it was, like I said earlier, it was different because we didn't have fried rice, which is something that we absolutely love and something that I would definitely like to upgrade my meal to include. So know that going into it. You're not going to get any fried rice. The food quality itself was all good. We will say that the chicken was a touch dry, but that can happen when you're cooking chicken on a flat top griddle. It's easy for it to dry out real quick if you cook it too long. And obviously they're trying to pay attention to multiple things being cooked and entertain you at the same time. At the end of the day, the chicken was a touch dry, but not bad enough to complain or not bad enough to say I wouldn't get it again. It just was a little bit dry. So in my recommendation, I definitely would stick with like the shrimp stick with the steak. If you like chicken, it's going to be good, but that could potentially be a little bit, try all in all. We enjoyed it very much. Our meal took about an hour to eat and total. We had a great time between the drinks and watching the chef cook the food there. And like I said, the food was good and we left full. So we really did enjoy ourself. Now what were the downsides? Okay. So there were some downsides number one, obviously, since there's three of us, we were sat with a group of five other people. It was a bigger group. They were fine. They were easy to eat with, but you can tell, obviously with five people that are talking across the table, they have more people. So they were a little bit louder than we were. We are isolated over to our little corner. So know that it is more of a community dining experience. You're not going to get your table where it's just you and your family. You're going to be sitting with other people. That was the first I don't want to say disadvantaged, but thing to be aware of when you're there. The biggest disadvantage, and this is definitely worth calling out because it shocked us. And I was very surprised. I asked even twice about it just to confirm we have annual passes since we go to Disney world so much. And with the annual passes, you get a dining discount for any eat in restaurant. And what I mean by eat. And as these are the actual ones where you go sit down and a, waiter's going to take your order. They don't work at the quick service. They don't work at the kiosks and things like that. So one advantage of going and doing a reservation and a sit down restaurant with an annual pass is you're going to get a discount. So we use this all the time. Every restaurant we go to, we especially love it over at Disney Springs. Because there's so many eat in restaurants, dine in restaurants over there. So it's a great thing to have. In fact, we have saved a ton of money with our annual pass. I can't say necessarily it's paid for the annual pass though. Our parking has definitely paid for our annual pass. But at Teppan Edo. They did not let us use our annual pass for a discount. I asked about it again and said, no, we are annual pass holders. I showed them the past and they said, yes, sorry. We do not do the annual pass holder discount here. So that is something to be aware of. If you are an annual pass holder. You are not going to get the discount there. That is the first time. At any Disney restaurant, we've encountered that here in Florida. So do be aware of that. I don't know if there's other restaurants that do not include it. I've, looked and I've not found a list of ones that do and do not allow the discount. I, but I was definitely surprised because if you've been to a hibachi restaurant these are typically more expensive meals. So that did take me back a little bit, but no problem. We got it all taken care of and went on with our night. So with that, that now brings me to the, I can do this all day tip of the day as well, some tips and tricks for when you're going to go to Epcot. And for, I can do this all day tip of the day today. I will say the food was really good. It was a great experience. I personally would not go again. It was a lot of fun. It was. Very entertaining. The food, like I said was great, but it was very expensive. And honestly the hibachi places that we have back here in Denver. Are better. They're more entertaining the food quality's a little bit better. There have been times that we've been more spaced out of the table. So there may be a couple of empty seats between us and another party, or maybe we had a large enough one that we took over the whole table ourselves. Even at five or six people. So I can say that our hibachi experiences in Denver have been better than what we experienced at Teppan. Edo now. Again, that doesn't mean it was bad. It wasn't bad. I'm just saying that the experience I've had here is better. So what I would recommend is if you have a hibachi place where you live. Go try that out. Go enjoy yourself there with your family. The experience is going to be relatively the same. It's probably going to be cheaper. It's probably going to be more entertaining. And then when you go to Epcot, I'd recommend you choose a different restaurant. For your dining reservation or like we do, you could go for a festival and just go eat at every single kiosk all the way around the entire park and get a huge variety of different foods from around the world. So I would definitely recommend you checking that out. Now, let's go back to, I set at the top of the episode, I would give you my recommendations for Epcot. And we do have an episode tied specifically to restaurants at Epcot and what we recommend. So we encourage you to go check that out because this is going to be a pretty similar list. But when I look at Epcot and knowing that we have eaten at most of the restaurants that are now, in fact, I will say, I have not eaten at every single one because there are a ton of restaurants at Epcot. And like I've said a few times, I really enjoyed the world showcase and all the festivals and eating all the food that rotates through. We don't always do sit down restaurants when we're there, but for the sit down restaurants that we have done, we absolutely love Le Cellier, in Canada, this is their steak house. That one, the food is absolutely fantastic. Now the atmosphere is a typical steakhouse. It's a darker room. So it feels that dark kind of musky little steakhouse type place. Very nice, but there's no entertainment in there, but the food quality is absolutely fantastic. So if you're going for quality of food, we definitely recommend Le Cellier. If you want atmosphere, I will say space 220. Has the best atmosphere. So obviously you get to go out into outer space. It's really cool. It's really immersive. And the food is average. We ate there, we enjoyed our food, nobody disliked their food at all. The dessert was phenomenal when we ate at space 220, but again, we said there's so many other good food choices and Epcot. We don't know that we would go back to space 220, but if you're looking for atmosphere and a really cool place to eat that one's gotta be towards the top of the list. Or maybe even the aquarium restaurant over at the living with the seas area. If you want a combination. Okay. So there are a couple of combinations. The Mexican restaurant over there in the Mexico pavilion inside the Aztec ruin is really, cool. The food is good and the atmosphere is cool because you're by the boat, it's kinda dark in there. It looks like night. It's similar to the blue Bayou over at Disney land out in Anaheim, which is really cool. So we liked that atmosphere. We liked the food there. It was good. It wasn't, like I said, the food wasn't as good as Le Cellier but it was better than space 220. So we'd recommend that. The other one that I recommend, if you're into character's is go to garden, grill in the land. This is a cool restaurant because the restaurant itself rotates. And, not quickly. So you're going to go sit down and you barely even feel it, but the restaurant is continuing to spin as you eat. And it takes you over living with the land. So you get to see some of that ride, but then they have characters that come through. So you've got Mickey and his friends. That are going to be coming through, dressed up in farm gear. So like they're working on the farm, but the food is actually really good. It's very similar to what you would get over at Liberty tree Tavern or the golden horseshoe over magic kingdom. It is family style and it's all you can eat. So they're going to bring you this huge mountain of food that you and your family can share. And if there's anything that you like, that you want more of you just ask and they're going to bring it to you. So you get things like corn bread, Mac and cheese, Turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy. So it's that typical country farm home-style meal. That's just fantastic. But the food they actually did really, well with garden grill. So we highly, recommend that. And then over in Norway, there is a princess dining experience over there. Again, that's really fun for the kids that love the princesses. We would encourage you to go do that if that's the case for your family. But I will say because it's a Norway, the food is a little bit different. And though it's high quality, it's not the best food we've had over an Epcot. So if you're looking for the best foods, I would say again, Le Cellier, the Mexican restaurant or garden grill are probably going to be your top three choices. Now again, we've only eaten at one of the Italian restaurants. We've only eaten at a couple of the French places. We have not eaten at every single restaurant in Epcot yet. So there may be some other gems out there that may be fantastic and may be worth your time as well. We just haven't experienced them all yet and know that when you're on your vacation, you're not going to get to experience them all either. There's no way you have enough time to cover all the restaurants there. Even if you did breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, the week for five days you're not going to be able to there's more than 15 restaurants there, so you're not going to be able to get through them all. So know that Epcot is a challenge. To get through all the food over there. But we absolutely love Epcot. We love the food choices there. Again, back to the episode, the hibachi was a lot of fun. The food was great. I just think that the hibachi that we've seen here in Denver is a little bit better. So I would recommend check out your one at home first and pick a different restaurant when you go. With that we wish you a magic week as you're planning your next vacation. And we will talk to you next time. Bye. Bye. Exit Music