Disney Dining: The Grand Floridian's Garden View Tea Room

If you haven't been able to tell, I'm totally and completely obsessed with Disney. Like, dreaming of my next vacation before this one ends, wearing my Minnie Mouse ears into the park, and squealing as I type up the perfect caption as I post meeting Peter Pan on Instagram, obsessed. The extreme foodie in me loves picking out restaurants--reading the reviews, finding the best of the best, and sitting down and eating after a long day in the park. Over the summer, I really wanted to do a Disney mini-series and never got around to it, but I'm going to test the waters here with a restaurant review.

As part of my parents' Christmas/anniversary gifts, I treated them the tea at the Garden View Tea Room, which is in Disney's Grand Floridian Resort and Spa. My parents are Disney Vacation Club members (their home resort is the Boardwalk) and we stayed half of our stay in the Grand Floridian to try it out. Friends of ours really raved about Afternoon Tea at the Garden View Tea Room, and when it Rome, right?

We ended up doing the basic package: The Bedforshire Tea, which, for $30 a person, gets you three courses (sandwiches/cheese, scone/tart, and a small dessert) and a pot of tea, which you choose yourself. The prices and packages go up from there, but the basic tea did include quite a bit of food. I would probably never yearn to do the most upscale package, which includes caviar, but would love to maybe go up a step or two and get an additional cheese course or a glass of champagne.

For my tea, I chose one of their seasonal selections and I cannot seem to remember what it was! I remember that I did really enjoy it and drank almost the whole pot (roughly 3-4 cups). The tea is all served in personal pots equipped with embroidered covers.

The first course, like I said, is a medley a finger sandwiches served with berries, cheese, and lavosh crackers. I ended up substituting two of my sandwiches (the cucumber and the egg salad) for PB&J instead, just out of preference. The other two are a curry chicken salad and an open-face beet and cheese. All four of my bites were delicious! Along with the grapes and berries, there was also a gruyere and onion tarte (Heavenly) and some cheese and crackers. The Sage Darby cheese was delicious--my parents and I agreed on that. 

The second course was a buttery scone and jam tarte. The scone was served with apricot jelly, clotted cream, and lemon curd to mix and match. This course wasn't as exciting as the first course, in my opinion, but was still decadent. 

The third and final course was dessert, which was the option between English trifle (not pictured), house-made pastries and strawberries and cream. Since there were three of us, we each got something different and split. I was particularly smitten with the creme puff swan (almost too pretty to eat...almost) and the trifle, which was cranberry. 

Aside from the excellent meal, our server was just as up to par (shoutout to Amanda) and the room is beautiful. It's a relatively small space but is decked out in classy drapes and fabrics with marble tables and plush chairs. We were lucky enough to snag a window table and the view of the Grand Floridian grounds was stunning. 

And that is that! This post is going up very late--I was in Disney back in early January--but I still wanted to post this. If you're a Disney fanatic like me, I highly recommend having Afternoon Tea at the Grand Floridian. It was a nice, blissful way to break up a crazy day (we were staying in the Grand Floridian for the second half of our stay, and had tea in between a packed day at the Magic Kingdom) and I would absolutely, absolutely do it again!

What's your favorite Disney activity?