Kouzzina by Cat Cora

We arrived at Walt Disney World on Saturday Dec 5th. That afternoon we went to our the first park, EPCOT. Joy and I had dinner reservations that evening at Kouzzina in the Boardwalk resort right behind EPCOT. Kouzzina is a new restaurant where Disney has partnered with Iron Chef Cat Cora for her first signature restaurant.

The restaurant has a Mediterranean "theme" to it and is filled with photographs, maps, etc of the Mediterranean region. One of my favorite parts was the open-air show kitchen.



To start, we each got a flight of wine. Joy had the Cat Flight. These are all from Cat's "Coranation" line of Wines. She had a Sauvignon Blanc that had notes of ripe apple, blood orange and spice, a Chardonnay that Cat specifically designed to go with her Mediterranean style food, and a Pinot Noir with hints of cherries, cranberries and cinnamon.

I had the California Fruit Bomb flight. It had a nice Graff Family Grenache, Edna Valley Vineyards Syrah and a Zen of Zin Zinfandel. The Syrah was my favorite. For appetizer, we had a Saganaki, which was a skillet seared Haloumi cheese with grilled lemon and oregano. Of course it was awesome, it was seared cheese.















Something that was truly amazing was the complimentary bread and butter. Now bear with me here. The bread was a fairly typical but it was fresh baked. The interesting part was the the butter. It was sweet and topped with Hawaiian sea salt which gave the bread and butter an amazing kick when you got a bit of the salt.

For our entrees, Joy had the Fisherman's Stew which consisted of scallops, snapper, shellfish, and fennel. The broth of the stew was amazingly rich with a deep tomato and olive oil flavor. The seafood was cooked perfectly, but the broth was the stand out. We literally cleaned the bowl with the grilled bread that accompanied the stew.















For my entree, I had the Slow-cooked Lamb Shank with Gigantes Beans and Pepper Sauce. It was delicious. The lamb was so tender, I could easily pull it apart with a fork. I'd never had gigantes beans before and they were huge. The size of my thumb.



For dessert, we tried two items. The first were the Loukoumades which are Greek doughnuts drizzled with warm honey. They came with two dipping sauces: a raspberry and a vanilla cream. Overall they were good, but when I covered one of the doughnuts with the vanilla cream sauce it tasted just like a Krispy Kreme glazed! Our second dessert was a warm molten chocolate cake called the Budino Cake. Pretty standard as far as these cakes go. This particular kind of cake seemed to be a trend across WDW restaurants. We found it on quite a few menus.

With our desserts, we had a pot of Kouzzina Pressed Coffee with Cat's special blend. It had a rich, dark chocolaty flavor. It was so good, it's made Joy and I serious fans of pressed coffee.

Overall, Kouzzina was very good and it stemmed two trends for us (1) our love of french press coffee and (2) salting our bread and butter.

-- Jeff