When Citricos reopens at Disney World’s Grand Floridian Resort on July 15, it will be sporting some touches of “Mary Poppins Returns.”
Karen McClintock, Disney’s food and beverage content relations manager, wrote on the official Disney Parks Blog that guests will dine “underneath the lovely London sky” in the revamped restaurant.
“Taking subtle cues from the movie’s animated sequence, the dining room brings guests into a fanciful garden setting where you can ‘trip a little light fantastic’ as you experience the restaurant surrounded by the glow from decorative lamps and chandeliers,” McClintock wrote.
New menu items at Citricos (Disney)
Along with the retheme comes a new menu. Appetizers will include sweet corn bisque with pickled fennel, popcorn, and fennel oil, and a strawberry salad with chamomile-infused goat cheese, frisée lettuce, bacon vinaigrette, and spiced sunflower seeds. For your main course, new options include butter-poached Florida cobia with mashed fingerling potatoes, grilled asparagus, and local mushrooms with a grapefruit beurre blanc, or guava-barbecued short ribs with aged cheddar creamy grits, roasted poblano, curtido slaw, and Brussels sprouts.
The restaurant will begin taking reservations on July 1 ahead of its reopening two weeks later.
This isn’t the first injection of Disney characters into Grand Floridian. In October 2019, the hotel’s lounge reopened with a “Beauty and the Beast” theme. The resort itself was modeled after Victorian era beach hotels in Florida during the late 19th and early 20 centuries — which doesn’t match the settings of either “Mary Poppins Returns” or “Beauty and the Beast.”
Along with the reopening of Citricos, Disney also announced that Trail’s End Restaurant at the Fort Wilderness Resort will be welcoming back guests July 17.
The dining location will transition to family-style meals (since COVID-19 has eliminated buffets for the time being) featuring smoked brisket and eggs, bacon, sausage, and Mickey waffles at breakfast. For dinner, the new Smokehouse Skillet comes with pecan-smoked brisket, rotisserie chicken, andouille sausage, fingerlings potatoes, green beans, and buttered corn on the cob.
New items at Trail’s End (Disney)
Notably missing from that menu: fried chicken, for years a staple of Trail’s End.
Inside the theme parks, Magic Kingdom will get back two quick service locations when Casey’s Corner reopens on June 30, followed by Plaza Ice Cream Parlor on July 7.