Review of Epic Universe Orlando

In this week's episode, Jared reviews the new Epic Universe park from his two day visit in July. 

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On this week's episode of A Dryer Dose of Disney, Jared gives us his review of the brand new Epic Universe Park in Orlando. Welcome to this week's episode of a Dryer Dose of Disney. I'm your host Jared Dryer, and today. We are gonna be covering the much anticipated episode. That is our review of Epic Universe. So if you've listened to our other episodes, we've talked about the fact that we went out to Orlando at the end of July and my family and I had two days at Epic Universe and we had an absolutely great time there. It was a ton of fun. And we have a lot to tell you about. So there's a lot to cover in this episode. So before I dive in and start telling you all the cool, wonderful things about Epic Universe, we do wanna ask wherever you listen to us, or if you're watching us on YouTube, find that subscribe button and click that. That way you can get this content delivered into your inbox each and every single week. And in fact, next week we've got our Epic Universe Rope Drop episode, and we're gonna take you through how we would navigate the park if you go. So that's gonna be a great one to listen to. You're definitely gonna wanna subscribe to that. But then also we've got tons of links in our podcast description down below. Everything from Patreon, if you wanna support the show to our condo, to other things that you get some cool credits on. So like the Southwest rewards card or mouse dining where you can do reservations for your favorite Disney places and the whole nine yards there. Lots of really cool things in our podcast description down below. So please check those out. But I wanna dive right into it because this episode's gonna take us a while to get through all of the cool things. At Epic Universe, if you haven't heard a lot about Epic Universe. Epic Universe opened up in May this year, and actually they did preview days starting in about February or March. But it actually opened to the public in May, and this park has been absolutely sold out. So this is Universal's third theme park in Fourth Park. If you. The waterpark out there as well. But this is the third big theme park. It is offsite, meaning it is not close to their other two parks universal studios and islands of adventure. It's actually gonna be a little bit away. It's gonna be a few miles away from them. And they have their own parking facility, their own structure there. Of course, if you're staying on with Universal, they've got some buses that can shuttle you back and forth, but this is going to be a totally unique theme park for them out there. And it is totally cool. Lots of cool things to see at Epic Universe. Now, I will say, because it was just built they do not have a lot of shade in this park. So please be aware of that and that if you're gonna go, as always, we always recommend carry a poncho with you if you're going to Orlando, because you could always need that. But also at this park, I would highly recommend that you wear sunscreen and that you got a ball cap or something like that. Especially if your head is like mine. If you're not watching me on video, I do have a shaved bald head. And we did get a lot of sun out at Epic Universe. It was very hot. But still very enjoyable and they did a really good job of theming this park and trying to. Provide shade and provide cover where they can. And they do have cool zones throughout the park, which is the first time I've seen that. And that was a really great idea. They've got these areas set up with benches and with fans and misters going so that way you can go sit and cool off a little bit. And we did utilize those a few different times throughout the day. So I highly recommend that you stay hydrated, you get some sunscreen, and then go use the cool zones out there. But if you're not familiar with the park is divided up into five distinct lands. So the first land is the center of the park. As you walk in. And this is Celestial Park. So as you go in it's similar to the Disney model where you have the hub and spoke, and the hub is the center. So this is the Celestial Park part of the park. And you're gonna go in there, you've got your shops in there, you've got a lot of really great restaurants in there, which we're gonna talk about in a little bit. They've got their main hotel there on the backside of Celestial Park, as well as two rides. So they've got the carousel and they've got Stardust Racers, and we'll come back to those in just a minute as we go through our review of the rides. Then as you go through the park, you have four different portals that go off basically in four different directions. And they're on the diagonals, meaning they're not on the compass North, southeast, and west.'cause you're coming in on the south side. But they're on the corner. So northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest. And those different areas are the Super Nintendo land. So Super Nintendo land is on the left as you go in above that is the universal monsters land. The classic monsters, which includes Dracula, Frankenstein, wolf man, the invisible man the creature from the Black Lagoon, so many of these great notable monsters from back in the day. And that land is just a ton of fun. We'll talk about that in a moment. And then on the other corner of the park you have the Harry Potter Ministry of Magic, which this one's a little bit different. It leaves the Harry Potter cannon a little bit because it's in France. And then of course, the Ministry of Magic in all the movies is in England. But they have it set in France here to tie it a little bit more to Fantastic Beast, and we'll talk about that in a moment. And then you have the Isle of Burke, which is the How to Train Your Dragon Land. So you've got four distinct lands surrounding Celestial Park. And I will say this park is really good sized. It's very large. It at least feels large when you compare it to other park sizes that are out there. I Googled it and I looked, and it's just right in the middle of the mix with everything else, but I'll say when you're walking through the park, just because of how big each of these portals are and the lands in there, and then to get to them. So cutting across the park to get to the different portals. Does feel like a very large park, so reminiscent of Magic Kingdom or Disneyland, where you've got adventure land, you've got Frontier Land, you've got fantasy land, the same kind of format here where you've got all these different lands or like islands of adventure where you've got the different islands. The biggest difference being you can get to them all from the middle of the park, which is very convenient and nice. So that is the park layout. Of course, you can go online and pull a map of the whole park if you'd like to. And we recommend that you do in fact do that when you're planning out your day, so that way you're not gonna be running back and forth or cutting diagonals a lot because like I said, it is a larger park and it's gonna feel like you're just walking all day to get to everywhere you want to go. So we definitely recommend like most other park that you do have a strategy going in and attack it in a certain order. And again, we'll talk about that on our next episode. So let's talk about the rides in each of the lands. Now of course, you've got a couple rides in most of the lands except for one, only the Harry Potter World only has one ride there. So let's go through, we're gonna start at Super Nintendo Land, which this is actually, if you've been out to Universal Studios Hollywood, it's pretty comparable to that in the sense that they have the Mario Kart Bowser's Challenge. And that is a fantastic ride, and we reviewed that on that episode as well. But I'll tell you this is a great dark ride rendition of Mario Kart. So they've got virtual reality goggles that you put on. Everybody gets a unique headpiece. Those do get cleaned between rides, meaning you're gonna pull it out of a bin, it's been freshly cleaned for you. You're gonna put that on your head. And then the virtual reality goggles. Are magnetically gonna clip onto that which makes it a lot easier and a lot cleaner, I think to do the ride versus everyone putting on and off the same visors and it touching their face. So this is a great way to do it, but you're gonna get on the cart and the cart holds four people. And very similar to some of the other rides you're gonna see, like men in Black where you're gonna go through the ride and you're gonna go up against other carts or go parallel to other carts as you go through. But your goal is to earn coins by using the trigger on the steering wheel, as well as to drive the course. So as you're driving the course, you're gonna see arrows pointing which direction to go. You do get coins if you steer in the right direction, and then you're gonna get your turtle shells to shoot the enemy. And the enemy, of course, is Bowser and his kids. If you've played Super Mario three, which is back on the original Nintendo. That Bowser's got kids and they all come in the flying ships and you're gonna go through and fight those same kids and you can shoot them with your steering wheel. So that's a great way to earn some coins as well. And they're gonna take you through different courses as you go through this ride. Each course, they're not very long. They're all, just gonna be a few yards long and you're gonna have them each for about 30 seconds or so, and then you're gonna go through different ones, including Rainbow Road at the end, which is totally awesome. And it's trippy at the same time.'cause it's in the virtual reality goggles. But you're gonna get a chance to see all that. And so this is a really great ride. In fact, if you're looking at the wait times when you're looking at this park, you're gonna see that this typically has one of the longer wait times. That's in part due to the fact that the load unload timing similar to like test track at Epcot, where you're gonna go and they're gonna bring in four cars at a time and they're gonna load everybody and then, dish 'em all out and then bring in four more. So it does take a little while to get on and off this ride, but we're gonna give you some tips and tricks with that here in just a little bit. We definitely love Mario Kart. That is a must ride next in the back of Super Nintendo Land, they have Donkey Kong country and this is a new edition. Universal Studios does not have Donkey Kong country and so this is a really cool part of the park. They did great with theming it and really tying it into Super Nintendo land. And then you've got Donkey Kong's mine carts the rollercoaster in the back now riding that. We waited quite a while for that ride. We got on it. The ride's fun. It's cute. It lacks a lot. And in fact, I would say if your day's getting tight and you're looking for a ride to skip, this is one that I would recommend personally and say it, there's other rides that are better than this one, and so if you needed to skip one, this is one I may recommend. Now the ride itself is fairly short. The rollercoaster itself is pretty jerky for being a new coaster, 'cause usually new coasters are very smooth. Because they've not been worn out yet, or they've not had the chance to accumulate all the different bumps and turns that you're gonna experience from an older rollercoaster. But I was a little bit disappointed with how jerky it was, and it just, it didn't feel very smooth or very worked out like they didn't work all the kinks outta this ride. And on top of it, as you're going through the queue, they're talking about getting the golden egg. And that's what's going on here in the Donkey Kong world. And the ride didn't really personify that quest very well. Meaning you do see a golden egg at the very end but they're not chasing it. You don't see it in different scenes. It's just, you go on the ride and at the very end day, oh, there is a gold egg here at the end. So I will say at the end of the day, this was not the best ride. Now it does have a conveyor belt queue, which I absolutely love. So similar to Haunted Mansion or Peter Pants flight. You're gonna be able to get on as this thing is moving, which definitely helps speed up the queue time. So that is nice. But at the end of the day, again, this wasn't a great ride. And I would say there's a couple rides that you can skip this being one of them. We'll talk about the other one later in the, I can do this all day tip of the day. Next, let's work our way over around to the monsters land. So the classic universal monsters, this land was very well themed. Very well designed. I absolutely love these old classic mostly black and white movies, and I love the monsters they personify and they did a fantastic job. Of building this dark more world and having Frankenstein's Castle there and the rides that are out there. So they've got two rides. You've got Curse of the Werewolf, which is an, actually, it's an outdoor rollercoaster that spins now in the United States. We don't have a ton of spinning rollercoasters. You've obviously got Guardians of the Galaxy. Cosmic Rewind that spins, and I don't want to compare it to that because it's totally different. If you've ever been to Disneyland, Paris over there at the Walt Disney Studios, they have crushes rollercoaster, which is a spinning rollercoaster, and I would most closely compare it to that. So if you've ever done crushes rollercoaster out there in Paris this one is very similar. It's similar in length. That's not a very long rollercoaster. But if you've ever ridden that, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. But you're gonna get in these carts it's four people per cart and they're face, they're sitting back to back. So you've got two people facing one way, two people facing the exact opposite. And then when you're looking at the cart in front of you, you've got people facing you.'cause they're on the backside of their cart as well. This ride is, it's great. It goes back and forth, like a boomerang type ride. If you've seen those at some of the other parks and you go through this really cool barn that has the wolf man in it. The challenge to this ride is because it is spinning, it's difficult to see the wolf man, if you really wanted to go look at 'em. But it's a fun rollercoaster. It's not very long. It's not gonna make you too sick because a lot of people have asked, Hey, with all the spinning, is this thing gonna make me throw up? And, am I gonna regret writing it? And I'll say it short enough that, no, you're probably not gonna regret riding it. It didn't make me feel sick at all. It didn't make anyone in our group feel sick at all. Now, my wife, who's the most prone to this, decided to opt out and not ride this one. So I can say that I didn't get a good response from her in the sense of to know, does this really impacts people? But I myself sometimes get sick from that kind of stuff. And I will say. I did not feel sick on this one at all. In fact, it was less intense than the guardians of the Galaxy. Cosmic rewind. So again, this queue is outside. So in the heat you're gonna feel it quite a bit more over here. They do have a single rider line, so we do encourage you to take advantage of that if it's early in the day and you can get through it. Now next door to it is monsters unchained, and this is a fantastic ride and not only a great ride, but an amazing queue as well. So you go through the castle, there's so much to see, so much to watch in here. It is a ton of fun. Now we have had people ask. Is it scary? Are, am I gonna have my kids frightened? And I will say the castle, the queue itself isn't bad. There are a couple parts with videos or some there's a large statue of Frankenstein that they're showing you all of his body parts and things like that. They do have a mummy Towards the end is it, is the cue scary in and of itself? No. The queue's not too bad, but I will say that the ride may be a little intense. For your younger kids and by younger kids I'm saying maybe seven and under, if they're not familiar with the monsters you are gonna go through this ride. You are gonna see the majority of the monsters throughout the dark universe era, and you're gonna interact with them. So it can be a little bit intense. You are gonna have monsters I don't say jumping out in front of you, scaring you. But there are monsters that are chasing the cart throughout the ride. So do be warned of that. But this is a fantastic ride. In fact, I'm gonna tell you right now I'm not gonna rank all the rides for you at the end. And I'm gonna tell you, this was my favorite ride in the park by, actually, by quite a bit. So this ride is fantastic. Now, the mechanism for the ride is very similar to Harry Potter's Forbidden Journey in the Hogwarts castle at both Universal Studios, Hollywood and Islands of Adventure. But what is significantly different is it's a, it's not 3D and b, the screens that you're watching. So in the Harry Potter ride, you're flying and going through quidditch and all that. These, the screens are way far away, like across the room, far away. And so I got zero motion sickness on this. I can tell you that I rode this ride multiple times. Loved it. Never felt sick on it at all. There are a few times, if you're familiar with the Harry Potter ride, where when you're in your cart you know they're gonna put you on your back. So you're looking up to see what's happening above you. And there are quite a few times you're gonna be on your back. So if you have keys in your pocket or anything like that, they could potentially fall out. So I encourage you to use the lockers and get everything outta your pockets before you go on this ride. But it is a great ride. And they did a fantastic job at combining live action with the video screens and putting 'em together in such a way that won't make you sick. Unlike Harry Potter's forbidden journey where a lot of people actually do get sick on that ride. This is by far, like I said, the best ride in the park. I wanna encourage you, highly encourage you to ride it. And because the queue loads so quickly typically doesn't have much longer of a wait than about 10 or 20 minutes. So it's a great one. Now let's go over to Harry Potter World. In this land the Ministry of Magic, there is only one ride over there, and that is the battle at the ministry of the magic, and it's through the metro floo. Now, I don't want to spoil this ride for you, and I'm not gonna tell you a lot about the story, but what I will tell you is the queue is really good. You're gonna go through. Ministry of Magic, you're gonna go through the floo network. You're gonna get to see some of the offices and stuff like that. So I do wanna encourage you to go through and see the queue. Now, the best part is a lot of people realize that when you ride single rider, that sometimes you are bypassed, you miss the queue. That is not the case here. In fact, the single riders are gonna go through the exact same queue as everyone else. You're gonna get to see all of the same stuff. For the most part. There's one office that you're gonna miss in the single rider queue, but other than that, you're gonna see everything else that everybody sees in the standard queue. So this is a great ride for single rider. Now, when you get on this ride it's tough to find a ride to compare it to. But the best examples I can give you if you have been to Universal, is it's similar to Transformers and Spider-Man. But also similar to Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey again. So the cart's gonna move more like Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, but the format is very similar to Transformers and Spider-Man. Now, again, they did a fantastic job of really backing this ride away from the screens. So the screens are whole walls and whole fields of vision, which is really cool, and that gives an opportunity to really tell a better story. And at the same time, it keeps people from feeling sick. In fact, my wife did ride this one. She does not like Harry Potter's forbidden journey, and that one makes her very sick. She rode this and did fine, she said at the very beginning there's you're going through the ministry and again, I don't wanna spoil the ride and tell you what happens. But you're going through some of the scenes fairly quickly and she said that one made her feel a little bit uneasy right at the beginning, but after a few seconds, once the ride got going and then you open up into bigger worlds and see bigger things, she said she felt totally fine and was great the rest of the ride. So I will say that this is a great ride. Now, many argue this is the best ride in the park. I will tell you that this is either in second or third for me. It was of course a great ride. It's a great Harry Potter ride, but there are again, monsters, unchained is a better ride. And then one other ride. I do think edges this one out as well, but Battle of the Ministry magic is great. If we go over now to Isle of Burke you've got three rides in here. You've got Hiccups Winged Gliders, which is. People argue, it's like Slinky Dog Dash, it's a family rollercoaster. I completely disagree. I will argue against that all day. I feel like this is a much bigger rollercoaster than Slinky Dog Dash. It is much more aggressive. I would, if I'm gonna put it on par with something, the closest coaster I could put it on par to is Haggard's motorbike. It's not as aggressive as Haggard's motorbike, and I would agree with that, that it's not that aggressive. But it is a bigger rollercoaster like haggard's motorbike. It is not as small as the buck beak ride the fly to the hippogriff. It is not as small as slinky dog. It is not as small as some of these others. And then again, it's not as intense as haggard's motorbike or Velocicoaster. So this one's kind of that middle of the road rollercoaster. My wife did ride it, it did make her feel sick. She was very upset. She rode it when it was done. She thought it would be much more mild than it was. But this is a great rollercoaster and does very well with the how to Train Your Dragon story and kind of incorporating all that. So again, I will compare it most closely to Haggard's motorbike. So if you've ridden that that is gonna be your best point of reference for hiccups, winged gliders. Now, right next to that are the Dragon Racer Rally rides. And there's two of them side by side. This is a kind of a cool ride that goes in a circle up in the air, and you have the opportunity to try to flip your dragon as it's flying. I will say I rode this. I did not get sick on this at all. I did my absolute best to flip my cart on this. And I got all the way completely inverted and my family group that was with me saw me get it completely inverted and they said they saw it completely inverted. And in fact, they had another person in our group that I couldn't see'cause they were off to the side. They also got theirs completely inverted. But we were never able to get it to do a full barrel roll. So if that's something you're interested in, you wanna get a little bit more intense, I encourage you to go online and check out ways to do that. But the Dragon Racer Rally was a fun quick little ride. The wait's not too long if you hit it at the right time of day. And it, like I said, it's a great ride. Also an Isle of Burke is fire drill and this is the water ride. And they are gonna put multiple cars going at the same time, meaning multiple rafts out there so you can shoot each other. You're gonna get shot from people on the ground, you're gonna get soaked. So this is one we actually chose not to ride because I don't love getting wet. But we saw a lot of people ride it. They enjoyed it, but they did come off absolutely soak. So know that going into it. Now back out at Celestial Park in the middle they have two rides out there. They've got the center carousel, which is absolutely huge. That, that's a fun, easy, simple ride, good family ride. But they have stardust racers. And if you've not heard of Stardust racers or seen it yet you will, when you get in the park, it is dueling rollercoasters, meaning two rollercoasters going at the exact same time. And this ride is very intense. It is very comparable to Velocicoaster with the exception that you've got two going at the same time. So there's a lot of times you're gonna cross paths or look like you're gonna hit each other. But what is different is I feel like the Velocicoaster is a little bit better of a rollercoaster than stardust racers just because of the height. It gets up a lot higher. And then some of the elements like doing the corkscrew over the water at Islands of adventures are really cool element. Stardust racers has corkscrews, it has some of those cool elements. I will say that it has more G'S on this rollercoaster, meaning if you get that feeling. That sick feeling from too many GS too many, too much gravity. We are going through these turns and you feel your stomach go to your feet. Stardust Racers has much more g opportunity than Velocicoaster, so it did make me feel more sick than Velocicoaster does. But it is an aggressive rollercoaster. I will say this is probably number two in the park for me. This is above battle at the ministry just because it's an aggressive ride. It's a thrill ride. It's fast. It's got a lot of elements to it. Now when you go to get on this ride they do have the two lines. You have the green line and the yellow line, and we rode both. I will tell you that they are nearly identical. If you read online, a lot of people are gonna tell you that the green track is a little more intense, and I can't agree with that. I can't say that is true. The difference between the two is when they come and interact with each other, the green one does like a corkscrew at the top of the hill where you look you flip underneath and you look at the car underneath you, and then the yellow one does it at the bottom of the hill, which since you're at the bottom, you're not seeing the other car when you flip under. The difference of doing the corkscrew at the top is, don't get me wrong it's a little more edgier. It's a little bit more intense than doing it at the bottom of the hill. But I will say doing it at the bottom of the hill, you're doing it at a higher speed. And so it feels different on the yellow path. So I will say at the end of the day, these two paths are nearly identical. It is not different enough to say, yes, I would ride the green one over the yellow one, though most people believe that. So knowing that when you go to get on it and you get to the place where it splits, you actually see it on the ground. They give you two paths to green. In the yellow. I'm gonna tell you all day long, take the yellow path because you're gonna have a much shorter wait and the difference is negligible at best. And you're gonna get on a lot quicker and you're gonna save your wait time there. Definitely on Stardust Racers, I'm gonna tell you go yellow Path all day long. Now they do have two shows in the park. Over in Harry Potter World. They have Le Cirque Arcanus. And this is a great show. This is tied into fantastic beasts and it is phenomenal. So if you wanna see a great show definitely go check it out. They did a fantastic job with it. And then they have how To Train Your Dragon Show, which unfortunately we didn't get time to see. So I can't speak to that. But I have heard great things about that as well. Now this brings me to the part of the episode that I'm most excited about other than the rides and that is the food. And I will tell you, epic universe, whoever did the food at Epic Universe, they deserve a raise. They deserve a promotion. This person needs to be sent on the annual trip to Hawaii or whatever. They did a fantastic job. This is some of the best theme park food I have ever had in my entire life. There were countless things that we enjoyed, one after the other, and there were numerous times we said, this is better than Disney. This food is amazing. And so I wanna encourage you, if you're a foodie, epic universe has some of the best food I've ever had in any theme park ever. So you're definitely gonna wanna check it out. So lots of food highlights. We're gonna go through 'em. There's too many to list. We ate way too many things. But I'm gonna go through the top one. So if you heard the other episode when we talked about our summer update, I did tell you that the dining experience at Epic Universe was better than Disney. And I'm gonna hold to that. Most of the dining opportunities there were mobile ordering. You would go in, you'd go find a seat you're gonna mobile order on their app, and you're gonna scan the table code so they know where to bring it. So this is similar to what Chick-fil-A does, and it's a great experience, meaning you don't have to go up to the front of the line, you don't have to fight the crowd when it's time to get your food. You don't have to go to a mobile order station and pick it up with people cutting in front of you asking for cups of water, which is an absolute pet peeve of mine, and it drives me absolutely crazy. This is such a better experience where you're gonna go find your table, you're gonna do your order, you're gonna scan the QR code, and in a few minutes they're gonna bring your food to your table. 10 times of a better experience than what anything Disney has done. I absolutely love this. I think it's fantastic. And if you've heard our other episodes where we talk about doing a mobile order in line you can still do that if you wanted to. You can still build it all. You're gonna have to get into the restaurant to click I'm here and then scan your table. But you could still build your whole order while waiting in another queue for another ride. So still can do that same technique and accomplish both things. Again, phenomenal. They did a great job there. But let's talk through the best foods we ate. So I'm gonna start an Isle of Burke. We over there by how to train your dragon. We did get the mac and cheese cones. If you've heard our episodes about California Adventure out in Anaheim. One of our favorite foods out there are the mac and cheese cones over at the Cozy Cones Motel in Carsland. These mac and cheese cones at Isle of Burke beat those cones hands down, like it's not even a competition. The ones at Isle of Burke are 10 times better, and it's really down to the cone. The cone is like this flaky garlic bread that just pulls apart and falls apart in your mouth. It tastes so much better. It is seasoned, so much better where the Disney cones, don't get me wrong, they're good but they're just plain. These cones have so much flavor to them. They're amazing. They really compliment the mac and cheese very well. And we did too. We did the traditional mac and cheese with the goldfish on it. That was great. But we did the PB and j, which is the pork belly and j and jam on it. And that one is phenomenal as well, if you like to try more different flavors. So I highly encourage that. They were both good. Now I will say the PB and J one is more, I don't wanna say for adults, but I think adults would enjoy it a little bit more than the kids. The kids are gonna want the plain one with the goldfish on it. But we got both and they're phenomenal. So you definitely wanna try those out. Those are pretty filling, but good for a snack. Especially if you're mid-morning, mid-afternoon between meals, I would highly recommend those. Going counterclockwise. Now we're gonna go over to Harry Potter World and in the Harry Potter world they've got a few different places to eat there. But the first is we had two, we went to two restaurants here. The first one's the cafe, and I'm not gonna try to pronounce the name, so don't ask me to. But the cafe there has some amazing foods in there. We got the butter beer crepes, which you've probably read about online. Those are amazing. In fact, I will say those may take the high point of the best butterbeer thing. You can eat at any of the universal parks. They are up there and I would even say better than frozen butter beer. But we also got the Turkey sandwich and some of the other foods there, and those were good as well. Now don't get me wrong, they weren't the best things we had in the park, but they were definitely good and enjoyable. If you're going in to eat the crepe and you need a little bit more, I would encourage you getting those. Now across and back in the NOC turn alley area. So again, over at the park here, they've got that hidden alley in the back, like Universal Studios, Orlando does. But in there they've got Le Goblet Noir And this one is a great restaurant and it's actually a funny place. So it's a little hidden, I'll say, but when you go in it's not apparent where the restaurant is. You're actually gonna walk through this thing, go past a bar, you're gonna keep walking and go all the way back until you find the dining room. And there are multiple rooms throughout this place. And you can keep walking all the way to the back and find a nice, cool, air conditioned place that you're gonna be isolated in. And the food there was very good. So I got the pastrami sandwich, my wife got the charcuterie board. Both were really good. I absolutely love a good pastrami or corn beef sandwich, and this one did not disappoint. In fact, the bread, the flavor was so good. I was just constantly telling my wife, man, this is one of the best pastrami sandwiches I've ever had in my life. So I definitely wanna encourage you to go try that out. Now the drinks, both restaurants have their own drinks, so over at the cafe, they've got plumb juice. It was decent, it's a passion fruit juice. They're trying to continually reinvent the different drinks you can have in the parks. And that one was good. And then over at the Goblet restaurant they have this purple drink that's reminiscent of a grape type drink. So I don't wanna call it a power aid, but it's like a grape drink with some bulba. And it was very good as well, I wanna encourage you if you like, being adventurous and trying new drinks. They both have some great drinks at these restaurants as well. So those were both fantastic for good sit down meals. Now over at the Monsters Land, we went over to the Burning Blade Tavern. This is over by between the rides, between the werewolf and the monsters Unchained ride. And every few minutes they blades catch fire as they go. And this is from the Frankenstein movie. Be. So it's really cool to see. So if you get over there, you see the windmill going and it's not on fire, just give it a couple minutes. It will light up. Similar to the dragon over at Escape from Grengotts at Universal Studios, Orlando, where it breathes fire. This windmill is gonna catch on fire and light up, and that's really cool to see. But when you go in there, they have a bar. It's very small. And then around back, they have a food station that you can order from. And one of the most popular things there are the burnt cheese balls. These obviously they're not burnt. They're just black because they food color them that way. These were very good. They're a little bit spicy. They've got some jalapeno. And I'm, and some pimento. But those were very good. We enjoyed those. And then they have the monocle, which is their green signature drink over here that comes in a flask. And when you try that out it's good. It tastes a lot like Sprite. It's just Sprite with some other little juices added to it. And it was good. It just, it didn't knock my socks off. I think the other drinks over in Harry Potter World were better. And of course, butter beer is 10 times better than all of them. But they did their theming of a drink over there, and that one was very good. Now they also have the steakhouse over here in the Dracula land. And I, we did not get a chance to eat there because again, we just didn't have enough time to eat everything that we could have wanted to do. But the food at the Burning Blade Tavern was very good. Now come over to Super Nintendo Land. They have Toad Stool Cafe. We skipped this one in Orlando because we ate at it in Anaheim. And it's the exact same menu over here. And the food I will say at Anaheim was very good. So they've got some burgers and some sandwiches there, and those are all great. But they've got bowser's flaming Meatball challenge and it's a large meatball with a lot of hot sauce on it. And I will say it is very hot. So do not order this unless you really love to eat spicy food and burn your mouth. But that's a fun novelty type item over there as well. So if you wanna learn more about Toad Stole Cafe, I encourage you go check out our episode. For Universal Studios Hollywood, where we talked about Super Nintendo Land and listened to that because we did a full review and talked about all the different foods that we ate there. In the back of the DK Land. So Donkey Kong Land, they have the Donkey Kong Crush Float which is a banana, pineapple ice cream float that has some caramel popcorn and a waffle cone sundae on it. And it's good, it's enjoyable. I will say Doll Whip is still better over at Disney and I enjoy Doll Whip much more than this. But if you like ice cream, you want a good treat. It's not a bad treat to have, so I would encourage you to go check it out. Of course, your kids are gonna want it. It's a fun little treat for them to enjoy. And if you have a long line for the Minecart Madness, the Donkey Kong ride I would tell you this is a great treat to take with you into the queue and enjoy for a while because it's gonna take you a little bit to eat. So that's good. Now, out in Celestial Park, you have tons of restaurants. So they have a Chinese restaurant, they have a pizza restaurant, they have Atlantis, their big marquee restaurant right in the middle. And then my favorite because we did eat here and this was phenomenal. Was the Star and Oak Tavern, and this is a barbecue place and if you've heard me talk on other episodes, I absolutely love barbecue. The food here was very good. We tried multiple different things on the menu. The pulled pork was fantastic. The sausages were fantastic. The chicken was okay. The brisket was good, but it was a little bit dry, so I'm gonna warn you about that now if you do like brisket? know that it was dry and we did have to put quite a bit of barbecue sauce on it to liven it back up just a little bit. But they have great breads here. They have a live band playing. And the best part about this. Is they have the freestyle stations and it's refillable drinks here. Not very many places have refillable sodas where you can get as much as you want to drink in this park. This is one place that you can, so if that's important to you, I'm gonna tell you, go over to the Star and Oak Tavern. You're gonna love it there. You're gonna be able to get a refillable drink that you can go back to the freestyle station and you can change. Your soda type every time you go up there if you'd like. But you're gonna be able to get as much as you want to drink. So this was something we did for dinner, one of the two days, and it was perfect timing because they had a duo band in there playing. They had some good music. It was fun. They were interacting with the crowd and talking about universal movies. But then we were able to keep getting refills and takes our, take our time eating dinner and enjoying the drinks and the beverage and just sitting back and it wasn't crazy busy there. So that was a lot of fun. So I highly encourage you to go do that. So that's our review of the food. Like I said, they knocked it outta the park. We've read great things about moon pizza. We've read great things about the Chinese restaurant as well as the other restaurants in the park. So I can tell you there's probably not a bad place to go. In the park. One really cool thing that happened to us while we were there is Warwick Davis, if you're familiar with him from the movie Willow, or he played wicked in Return of the Jedi, and then he's in all of the Harry Potter movies. He plays goblins and he plays professor Filtwick and other roles in the Harry Potter world. He was there at the park and we got a chance to see him now. We didn't get a chance to interact with him. He was with his family and of course being escorted through the park and we didn't wanna interrupt them. But we did get a chance to see Warwick Davis, which was really awesome. He's one of my childhood heroes'cause I loved Return of the Jedi and Wicket was my favorite part of that movie when I was younger. So it was cool to see him in person at the parks. That leads us now to our two. I can do this all day. Tips of the day. The first tip is a no-brainer tip, and it's because it's one we've talked about on so many other episodes of use. The single rider lines here at this park, there are multiple single rider lines. In fact, they're on most of the bigger rides at this park, meaning the ones that the longer wait, you're gonna get an opportunity to do single rider. Now, the best part is you're still gonna go through the queue and you're gonna see these really immersive queues by still doing single rider, which is really nice, but you're gonna save hours of wait time. In fact, we rode the Mario Kart ride three different times with our longest wait, probably being 20 minutes, our shortest wait being we walked right on one of the three. So that was fantastic. Where the wait time in all three cases was over an hour. We were able to walk on two of the times, and then once we had to wait about 20 minutes. Because the ride had been down and then it came back up and the line was a little bit backed up at that point in time. They also have single rider at the Battle of the Ministry of Magic, and that line was a little bit longer. It took us, I would say, closer to about 30 to 40 minutes to get on that through single rider. But the best part was the wait was almost two hours at that point in time. So we definitely were quicker than half of the wait time. We still went through the queue, went right through towards the front and then just had to wait enough turns for us to finally get on. So I highly recommend. Do single rider. It's not worth running to these longer wait queues. First thing in the morning for rope drop when you can do single rider later. So we'll talk about that next week in our episode as we talk about a rope drop strategies here at Epic Universe. Our second one is, you may have noticed as I went through this park review, I omitted one ride and I did that on purpose'cause I wanted to save it for the, I can do this all day tip of the day at the end. And that is the Yoshi ride Over in Super Nintendo world. I can say I have never in my life been more disappointed in a ride than I was in this one. I will say at all costs, skip it. The only time I would ever ride it is if you have little kids. And when I say little, I'm talking younger than five. This ride when we went to go on it you can see it as you go through the Super Nintendo land. You can see it up on the perimeter, going around. It looks like it's similar to the Tomorrow Land Transit Authority. People mover over at Magic Kingdom where it's gonna take you through tomorrow land. And if you've ridden that ride, they take you through Buzz Lightyear, they take you through Space Mountain. You get to see a lot of tomorrow, land on that ride, and it's an extensive ride through the whole land. We believe that this would be the same that you're gonna go through. You're gonna see Mario Kart, maybe even go back towards Donkey Kong. And though we didn't see it back there, we thought it probably won't go back there or see it, but you're gonna go through the whole super Mario part of the world and see that from a bird's eye view. Wait, in fact, this r is so short I'm talking it's probably a hundred yards long. The loop is tiny. It is it's not even a, I don't even want to call it a kid ride. This is an infant ride. This is a ride that somebody under the age of two is going to enjoy. This makes small world look like a roller coaster. Okay, this is probably the lamest ride I've ever ridden in my entire life. And it didn't help that we ended up waiting about 20 or 30 minutes to ride it, anticipating it would go through most of the land and we'd get to see different parts of the land. And that's not the case. So skip this ride at all costs. It is not worth it. And unless you have people in your group under the age of five, anyone over the age of five is gonna be bored by this ride. They're not gonna want to do it, and you're gonna waste time at this ride. So definitely skip that. With that, we hope you have a great week as you're planning your next trip down to any of the magical parks, whether it's out in California or in Orlando. And again click that subscribe button. So next week we'll talk about Rope drop, and then we've got our Millennium Falcon Smugglers Run episode coming after that. So we will talk to you guys next time. Thanks. Bye-bye.