We tried the new BBQ Braai Chicken Pizza and Caramel-Apple Cheesecake Baumkuchen from the Connections Eatery Epcot Food & Wine menu. The pizza is fine if you know what you are getting into. The baumkuchen is a tougher sell.

Connections Eatery doesn’t get much attention during Epcot festivals, mostly because it spends most months of the year as Epcot’s default lunch stop rather than a festival destination. However, each festival it offers at least one limited-time food option. The usual pattern is to take a standard menu item at Connections Eatery and “jazz” it up. Examples range from Liege waffle, baumkuchen, pizza, or a sandwich. This year, it picked up two new items for the occasion: the BBQ Braai Chicken Pizza and the Caramel-Apple Cheesecake Baumkuchen. Below you will find the full review, the basics of visiting, a little history of the building itself, and a rundown of the rest of the menu.

Connections Eatery Epcot Food & Wine: The Basics

• Location: World Celebration next door to Connections Café
• Dates: Both festival items are available for the full run of the 2026 Epcot International Food & Wine Festival, August 27 through November 21
• Ordering: Mobile order through the My Disney Experience app or walk-up counter service. This is one of Epcot’s largest quick-service locations, so mobile order is worth using here, especially around lunch
• Seating: Extensive indoor and covered outdoor seating, easily one of the biggest dining rooms at Epcot, and a reliable place to sit down with air conditioning during a hot festival afternoon
• Snack credits: Both new items are eligible on the Disney Dining Plan
• Worth knowing: Connections Eatery keeps its full regular menu running during the festival too, burgers, salads, and standard pizzas included, so the two festival items are additions to, not a replacement for it

Connections Eatery: A Little History of the Building at Epcot

This place opened in spring 2022 as the replacement for the long-running Electric Umbrella, and it sits inside a building with a longer résumé than the restaurant itself lets on. The space started life as part of the original CommuniCore, Epcot’s opening day exhibit hall built around computers, communication, and the promise of a more connected future, a very on-brand name for a restaurant now called Connections. CommuniCore was reworked into Innoventions in 1994, an ever changing showcase of corporate sponsored exhibits that ran for roughly two and a half decades, hosting everything from an Apple Computer exhibit to Bill Nye the Science Guy segments before finally closing down as Epcot’s massive 2020s transformation got underway.

The building that once housed Innoventions East reopened as Connections Eatery, while the rest of that World Celebration overhaul brought in CommuniCore Hall and CommuniCore Plaza just a short walk away in 2024, reviving the CommuniCore name decades after the original exhibit closed. So the next time you are eating a slice of festival pizza here, you are technically doing it on the same patch of concrete where guests once learned about fiber optics from a robot named Tom Morrow 2.0.

Full Epcot Food & Wine Festival Menu Overview at Connections Eatery

Connections Eatery runs its full year round menu during the festival, including burgers, a rotating pizza selection, and salads. Below is what is new for Epcot Food and Wine 2026, plus the drink that rounds out the festival additions.

Food

• BBQ Braai Chicken Pizza ($12.29), two slices topped with tamarind barbecue sauce, arugula, a cheese blend, onions, and piri piri sauce
• Caramel-Apple Cheesecake Baumkuchen ($6.49), a layered German spit cake with caramel apple cheesecake flavor

Drinks

• Frozen Waffle Old Fashioned ($17.50), a frozen blend of Maker’s Mark Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, maple syrup, butterscotch syrup, and angostura bitters, topped with a liège waffle and a cherry

Review: BBQ Braai Chicken Pizza

$12.29

This pizza is asking two very different sauces to get along, and on opening day, they mostly did, but it was not a peaceful coexistence. The tamarind barbecue sauce brings a sweet, tangy base you would expect from any decent barbecue chicken pizza, and on its own it works fine. The piri piri sauce drizzled over the top brings some spicy kick, more than the average festival pizza asks of you, and it does not blend into the barbecue so much as interrupt it every few bites.

Depending on where your fork lands, you get a bite that leans sweet and smoky, or a bite that leans spicy and sharp, and the two versions of this pizza taste different enough that it feels like ordering a coin flip. The arugula and onions add texture and a little bitterness that helps cut the sweetness of the sauce, and the cheese blend melts well, but the overall effect is a pizza that knows exactly what it wants to be in theory and has not quite committed to it in practice.

This is a decent pizza, and if you like your barbecue with some Indian spice behind it, you will probably enjoy it more than we did. It’s not an easy recommendation for everyone, and at $12.29 for two slices, it is one of the pricier items at the festival, especially given the inconsistent quality. Still, the portion size earns respect. Order it if the flavor combination sounds appealing on paper. Skip it if you would rather not gamble on which bite you are about to get.

Review: Caramel-Apple Cheesecake Baumkuchen

$6.49

Baumkuchen, German for tree cake, is traditionally baked on a rotating spit so that each thin layer bakes into the next, creating rings that look like a cross section of a tree trunk when you slice it. Connections Eatery has rotated a new flavor through this format for a few festivals now, and this year’s caramel apple cheesecake take is, unfortunately, the weakest version we have tried.

The cake is dense, lacking the delicate, distinct layering that makes a good baumkuchen fun to look at, let alone eat. The caramel apple flavor leans artificial, more like the smell of a seasonal candle than an actual apple, and the cheesecake component is more of a suggestion than a real presence in the bite. It is also served cold straight out of a case, which does the texture no favors and leaves the whole thing tasting a little flat.

Get the Chocolate-Pistachio Cookie in Morocco Instead

At $6.49, this is money that could go toward almost any other dessert at this festival and come back with a better result. With so many genuinely well-made festival sweets scattered across World Showcase this year, like Blackberry Buckle at Regal Eagle Smokehouse or the Chocolate-Pistachio Cookie, spending a money here means paying festival prices for a dessert that tastes like it was an afterthought. We wanted to like this one. Nonetheless, we just cannot recommend it.

The BBQ Braai Chicken Pizza is a reasonable order for the right person. Still, it is not a dish we would send everyone toward. The Caramel-Apple Cheesecake Baumkuchen is a pass. In a festival this stacked with strong desserts, there is no good reason to spend your money here when better options are one pavilion away in either direction.

For more theme park dining reviews, visit MSM News every weekday at noon Eastern Time. Additionally, we sometimes post bonus theme park dining reviews. As always, eat like you mean it!

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