Welcome to Harvest Hollow Autumn Festival Inside Epcot Food & Wine Festival 2024

Welcome to Harvest Hollow Autumn Festival Inside Epcot Food & Wine Festival 2024. What we used to call the Rose Walkway because the cement was rose-colored, located between CommuniCore Hall & Plaza and World Showcase, closest to Journey Into Imagination Pavilion, are 2 brand new food booths and one transformed food booth. These three food booths make up Harvest Hollow. Adorned with autumn decorations and scents of fall. Harvest Hollow is the best addition to this year’s Epcot Food & Wine Festival presented by Corkcicle.

I say this knowing that everyone will have their own favorites and ideas of what is the best, but to us, this area reminded us of autumn up north. Stick to your bones’ food to keep your energy going all day. Sunday evening meals, apple picking, and pumpkin patches. Crisp cool chill in the air (Which we do NOT have down here in Florida). Baseball playoffs, and football on Sundays. But, since this is our review, we get to call it the best of the fest!

The three new food booths for this year’s festival are Bramblewood Bites, Milled & Mulled, and Forest & Field. You can see the full menus listed below. We would like to point out some of the best of these three. We tried everything from Carrot Cake to Grilled Cider-Brined Pork Tenderloin with Fennel Apple Slaw and Apple Cider Gastrique. While the meat dishes stood out, Grilled Bison I am looking at you, the drinks also stood out.

Spiced Apple Old Fashioned Inspired Cocktail with Boyd & Blair Rum from Bramblewood is a decent take on an Old Fashioned. The rum actually worked well and the scent of the drink was wonderful. It was like a candle scent drifting in the wind while taking a swig.

Grilled Cider-Brined Pork Tenderloin with Fennel Apple Slaw and Apple Cider Gastrique
Grilled Bison with Butternut Squash Purée, Roasted Mushrooms, and Huckleberry Gastrique

Both were easy to eat, not chewy. While I enjoyed the pork and fennel slaw, I thought the sauce was perfect. Pork doesn’t need to be overcooked like we live in the 80’s. So seeing a little pink made me happy. It was the most tender pork I have had in years and doesn’t deserve to be on some festival’s menu, it deserves more! The grilled bison was excellent and the puree and mushrooms made this dish phenomenal.

Over at Milled and Mulled Pear and Almond Frangipane Pâte Brisée was well done. The stand out though was Freshly Baked Carrot Cake with Walnuts and Cream Cheese Icing, even though I wanted a little more of the traditional carrot cake flavor this hit the spot. Blake’s Hard Cider Co. Cider Mill Donut Hard Cider and Coppertail Brewing Fallen Fruit Blueberry Pie Hard Cider, Tampa Bay were flavorful, and though I personally do not do berry anything, the people we were with raved about this. I liked the Apple Cider Donut flavor. It was spot on.

Forest & Field finishes off Harvest Hollow with the Autumn Chili with Bison, Lamb Pork Belly, Root Vegetables, Jalapeño Cornbread, Smoked Cheddar, and Crème Fraîche which is a Sunday stew that had a few flavors that reminded me of growing up. It was a great experience. Just a fair warning, it is a stew! It is still 95 degrees during the day and 80 at night. Nothing worse than having a thick stew sitting in your stomach in this heat!

The Pumpkin Mascarpone Ravioli with Sage-Brown Butter, Pecorino Cheese, and Hazelnut Praline was probably the only thing we all agreed was good, but not the absolute best. This isn’t saying it is bad, at all, and you may find this to be the best of the menu. The biggest issue we heard and thought was the crunch from the hazelnuts was a bit much.

In the end, these three food booths are going to be the first ones we return to when the weather gets cooler. While it may be too hot to enjoy them completely right now down here in the Florida heat, they will and are the food booths to eat at. The nice thing is Epcot Food & Wine goes until mid-November, so we will have plenty of time to enjoy the flavors and the area!