Walt Disney World has announced a new limited-time Parisian culinary experience with bottomless mimosas coming to the Chefs de France restaurant in World Showcase during the 2025 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival. This shares dates & details, including a menu overview and photos, plus why this is a significant development and hopefully a return to ‘2019 normal’ for the special event.
This year’s EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival starts on August 28, 2025 and runs through November 22, 2025 for a grand total of 87 days. It’s beginning and ending one day earlier than last year, which is roughly the historical norm. Although it had expanded in recent years, back in 2019 and earlier, the fall foodie festival typically began Labor Day weekend and ended the weekend before Thanksgiving.
While the event duration is already back to 2019 normal, the big unanswered question is whether the 2025 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival will be entirely back to normal in terms of substance. It used to have a jam-packed plate of seminars, special dinners, celebrity chef panels, and various enhancements. These have been absent for the past 5 years. Now, we know at least one such meal will be offered in 2025.
Here’s the official announcement about the Parisian breakfast buffet from Walt Disney World:
Indulge in a traditional French breakfast experience that transports you straight to the cafés of Paris. Delight in a bountiful breakfast buffet at Chefs de France featuring the following options.
Assorted French Pastries
- Buttery croissants, pain au chocolat, almond croissants and other assorted pastries
Freshly Baked Baguettes
- Crisp on the outside, soft and warm on the inside—ideal for spreading with creamy butter or luxurious French jams
Smoked Salmon
- Delicate and silky slices of smoked salmon, perfect for pairing with fresh bread or a squeeze of lemon
Cheeses & Charcuterie
- A selection of premium cheeses and artisanal cured meats
Fresh Fruit
- Seasonal fruit to balance the richness of the pastries and charcuterie
Enjoy the perfect accompaniment to your meal with unlimited mimosas, fruit juices and freshly brewed coffee served to your liking. It’s a leisurely breakfast made to savor with friends and loved ones.
This pre-paid Parisian breakfast buffet experience is only available for a limited time on Fridays and Saturdays during the EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival. Advance Dining Reservations for the Chefs De France breakfast buffet will open on August 12, 2025 for seatings starting on September 5, 2025.
According to a bulletin on the restaurant’s website, these ADRs will require pre-payment once booked starting August 12. It is unclear whether the standard cancellation policy will apply for this breakfast buffet, but the Chefs de France website does not currently reflect any changes.
Additionally, operating hours have not been added for the breakfast buffet experience at Chefs de France. Dates in September that have been posted thus far only list the standard lunch and dinner operating hours.
It’s also notable that a full menu and prices have not yet been posted. Given the unique nature of the experience, limited dates, unlimited alcohol, and just how expensive everything has gotten, we wouldn’t be surprised to see it cost low triple-digits per person. Hopefully that’s wrong and it’s around $70. Still expensive for breakfast, but that sounds about right for an exclusive EPCOT Food & Wine offering.
Our expectation is that all of this is coming with the release of Walt Disney World’s official ‘foodie guide’ to the 2025 EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival. It’s also entirely possible that more such culinary experiences will be revealed with the full Global Marketplace menus, which should be coming in the next week or so.
Our Commentary
Last year’s EPCOT Food & Wine Festival was incredibly underwhelming. So was the one before that, and the one before that, for that matter. But the difference last year was that the park was entirely wall-free, the event still was not back to “2019 normal.” The slate of seminars, culinary demonstrations, special dinners, celebrity chef panels, and various enhancements did not return.
Not only that, but the park didn’t even utilize its space for a fresh decor package–it was actually scaled back as contrasted with prior years. What had once been Walt Disney World’s signature special event of the year has easily become EPCOT’s weakest festival. I don’t think that’s even a controversial opinion at this point. It’s probably the consensus, as every other festival has food booths plus something else, whereas Food & Wine has become just the Global Marketplaces. More of them, sure, but that’s still the only offering.
As explained in EPCOT’s Food & Wine Festival Is Stale. Here’s What We Want Disney to Change, the event really needs a shot in the arm. Walt Disney World has been leaving money on the table by not bringing back the culinary seminars, demonstrations, meals with celebrity chefs, and other special events. These are the rare upcharge that’s a win-win for Disney and guests, and it’s perplexing that they’ve all yet to return.
With the CommuniCore Hall event space, it seems like a no-brainer, as all of these special events are pricey and generate a lot of revenue. However, CommuniCore Hall wasn’t used for that purpose during last year’s Food & Wine, nor any of the festivals since.
CommuniCore Hall was billed by Disney as a festival center that would be a “dynamic space to anchor” EPCOT Festivals and an event space “limited only by the boundaries of imagination.” Instead, CommuniCore Hall is just indoor seating and a couple of booths. To Disney’s credit, they’ve used the space better during 2025 festivals thus far, but it’s still nothing special.
We’re still holding out hope for a more robust 2025 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival. EPCOT has several other unused (or underused) events spaces aside from CommuniCore Hall that could be used. Maybe we’ll finally get the Wonders of Life pavilion or World ShowPlace put back into use for these events?! Probably not gonna happen, but we can dream.
This breakfast buffet at Chefs de France is certainly a step in the right direction and hopefully the first of many such announcements in the next couple of weeks. There are two things that are notable about this offering.
The first is that it’s being held not in a special events space, but at a table service restaurant in the France pavilion. So it’s not as if Walt Disney World needs to do anything out of the ordinary to accommodate this.
The second is that Chefs de France is not owned or operated by Walt Disney World. When it opened back in 1982, Les Chefs de France became the first restaurant in America affiliated with iconic chef Paul Bocuse. Since his passing, his son Jerome Bocuse still owns the company to this day.
This is notable because Chefs de France opting to do a special breakfast buffet experience during the 2025 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival is not necessarily indicative of any bigger-picture plans by Disney.
It could be that this is the first of many announcements, and Walt Disney World has been coordinating behind the scenes with restaurants around World Showcase. This news came out ahead of a splashier announcement due to an accidental website update (it’s been happening a lot lately).
But it’s equally likely that the third party operating participant that owns Chefs de France decided to do this on its own. Maybe ADRs are down and Chefs de France realized they have the staffing to make this work, so they decided to capitalize on the EPCOT Food & Wine Festival with an event they know is likely to sell out. A way of stimulating demand among repeat visitors to offset a decrease in tourist interest. Either way, this could be a sign of more to come.
Chefs de France is one of the most popular restaurants in World Showcase, so if they’re seeing a “need” to find ways to increase bookings, it’s likely other restaurants are in a worse position. Once the other third parties see how popular this is (and our expectation is that it’ll sell out quickly), they will likely want in on the action.
Maybe it’ll be too late for that to happen this year, but we could easily see similar special events offered around World Showcase at the 2026 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival. Hopefully there is a concerted effort behind the scenes at Walt Disney World to breathe new life into the festival, and we won’t have to wait that long.
Maybe this will be the year the EPCOT Food & Wine Festival turns things around after stagnating for the last 5 years. It sure seems like the special event has become less popular with each passing year, so here’s hoping that Walt Disney World has finally realized that it’s gotten stale and this is the first of many steps aimed at addressing that. We’ll keep you posted!
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YOUR THOUGHTS
Will you be trying to book ADRs for the Parisian breakfast buffet experience at Chefs de France? Would you book other upcharges if offered during the 2025 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival? Did you attend the event in any of the last few years? Hopeful any of the other demonstrations or seminars will return? Optimistic that CommuniCore Hall will actually be put to good use this year? Would you like to see Wonders or World ShowPlace venues make a return? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing feedback about your experiences is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
