Review: Afternoon Tea at Disney’s Grand Floridian Garden View Tea Room

For those of you who follow me on Instagram (@thenorthernprepster) you may know that Grant and I went to Walt Disney World for a long weekend to meet up with my family earlier this month. During their visit my sister, my mom, and me decided to celebrate Mother’s Day early since I live 1200 miles away.

My sister made reservations for us to do afternoon tea at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort & Spa. I’m going to be sharing my thoughts and pictures with you all so you can decide whether the $35-$88 per person splurge is worth it.

The Grand Floridian offers afternoon tea from 12-4pm daily in its Garden View Tea Room (located on the first floor), with three different tea packages to choose from. After much contemplation we decided to go with The Cheshire Tea package, the center tier.

There are 3 “tiers” available at the tea. The cheapest one, The Bedfordshire Tea, starts at $35. If you want a glass of champagne it is $15 extra, making it $50. This package comes with a medley of finger sandwiches, a traditional scone with accompaniments, and finally a choice of desert. You of course get your choice of tea, which may I say in a lengthy list that I will include a picture of.

The Cheshire Tea is $50 and includes all of the selections from The Bedfordshire Tea, but additionally you get a selection of fruits and imported cheeses. A glass of champagne is once again an additional $15 making it $65 total.

Finally we have The Berkshire, which may I add serves two, for the price of $150. Two glasses of champagne is an additional $25 making it $175, so you basically save $5 on the champagne. This package includes everything in The Bedfordshire Tea as well as “locally Sourced Mote Marine Siberian Surgeon, North American Caviar, and traditional accompaniments to share” according to the menu. We didn’t notice anyone in the tea room that got this package. I will say the champagne was a popular add on. However, we did not get the champagne because I am under 21 and my sister is on medications due to her recent c-section. My family personally isn’t too keen on caviar either, but I am assuming it would be delicious if you would decide to splurge!

Our waiter first took our tea order from an extensive Twinings tea list that is too long to type out, so I’ll just add pictures of it. There were so many choices but we all went for something fruity. I also highly recommend everyone in your party trying something different. Each person gets their own individual tea pot filled with the tea of your choice. They even put a cute little cozy on it to keep it warm. I chose the Apple & Elderflower green tea. It smelled just like apple cider but overall was flavorless. My sister chose Rose Garden black tea, which I didn’t get to try unfortunately, but her and my Mom both agreed it wasn’t anything special. My Mom’s choice was our collective overall favorite, the herbal infusion Superfruity. And let me tell you it was PACKED with flavor which is so uncommon in a lot of teas. I highly recommend that if you like a sweet fruit flavor. As promised, here is the extensive list of teas. They also have sugar cubes on the table and I’m sure they would have honey by request.

Shortly after our tea made it to the table, we got our first course of The Cheshire Tea, which was the selection of fruits and imported cheeses. This was by far all of our favorite course and it is definitely worth the little splurge! Unfortunately the menu doesn’t have a break down of what exactly you get on this platter, it makes me think perhaps it changes seasonally or depending on what they have available. But ours included the following; papaya, asian pears, pineapple, kiwi, fresh raisins, munster cheese, gouda cheese, cheddar cheese, basil cheese, and 2 cracker sheets. The plate was decorated with a side of jelly as well as an orchid flower. It was fun to try some fruits that we don’t normally have like papaya and asian pears. And the fresh raisins were delicious! You could tell they were fresh, they were still on the vine. Out of the cheeses the only one I didn’t enjoy was the cheddar, but I typically don’t like cheddar anyway. We all licked our plates clean with this course! I highly recommend it. ALSO just so you know for each course each person gets their own plate. I have a picture below of my fruit and cheese plate, so we basically had this times 3. That being said, we left this tea being STUFFED and we didn’t even get to finish it all.

Our second course was the medley of finger sandwiches, which comes with every package. The plate includes five mini sandwiches; tantalizing cucumber, sweet curry chicken, traditional egg salad, poached pear and gorgonzola cream cheese, and fire roasted tomato with oregano-goat cheese. We also had a small tart on our plates that wasn’t listed on the menu, which was a caramelized onion tart. We all came to the consensus that this was our least favorite course. None of us finished our plates, and the only one we really liked was the fire roasted tomato with oregano-goat cheese sandwich. The cucumber was very plain, sweet curry chicken tasted like a chicken ramen packet, the egg salad was REALLY eggy, pears and cheese is a weird combo, and the onion tart was just okay. Despite this plate not being successful for us personally, it was fun to get ot try everything. ALSO, my sister informed me that you can request multiples of a sandwich which is awesome for picky eaters and those with allergies. So next time I am getting a plate full of that tomato goat cheese one lol.

The next course was the scone with accompaniments. This raisin scone came with a Devonshire clotted cream, lemon curd, and strawberry jam. There was also a strawberry preserve tart on the side. This whole course was overall pretty tasty! The lemon curd tasted like the lemon in lemon meringue pie, the cream tasted like butter to me but was still good, and of course the strawberry jam was tasty. The scone was nice and warm, and had the perfect amount of raisins in it. I personally wasn’t a huge fan of the strawberry tart, but I don’t normally like tarts. But my sister and mom enjoyed everything!

The final course was dessert, at this point we were STUFFED, but there is always room for the good stuff 😉 There are three different desserts to choose from; house-made pastries, strawberries topped with whipped cream, and the seasonal English trifle. Since there were three of us and we wanted to try everything, we got one of each! The house-made pastries included a darling mousse-filled swan, which was yummy, a dark chocolate covered strawberry, which obviously was delicious, and two French macarons which according to my sister were delicious (my mom and I aren’t fans of French macarons). The strawberries with whipped cream were definitely “Instagramable” and were light and sweet. This is great option if you wanna stay away from artificial sugar, just don’t eat the whipped cream! I believe our seasonal English trifle (also very picture-worthy) was some sort of dark berry flavor, raspberry or blackberry. It has layers of lady fingers, hand-whipped creme, and chantilly which is a cream. When it came to the desserts there wasn’t one I would’ve been unhappy with. You really can’t go wrong!

Overall, we had a great experience with the afternoon tea at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort & Spa. If you are planning on doing this experience I highly recommend spending the extra $15 on The Cheshire Tea experience. The fruit and cheese platter really made it for us! They also offer an annual pass discount of 10% and remember they automatically add 18% gratuity. After the discount and gratuity it was around $56 a person. It isn’t the cheapest food option but none of us left hungry and it was all about the experience. They also have an option for little princes and princesses called Mrs. Potts Tea, with kid friendly options, so everyone in the family can be included. If you’ve tried this experience, share your thoughts! Let me know which tea and experience you chose! If you have any other questions feel free to ask.

Thanks for reading!

xoxo
Jayme