Review of Tiffins, the Fanciest Place To Eat at Disney’s Animal Kingdom

When people list their favorite things about the Walt Disney World resorts in Orlando, Florida, they rattle off the rides, the characters, and the so-called “Disney magic.”

But do you ever hear anyone raving about the food? And I’m not talking about the oddities like the enormous turkey legs (which seem more like a challenge than a meal) or the Dole Whips (which, frankly, are overrated).

After spending years reading about and listening to people talk about their food experiences, I kept hearing recurring complaints about everything except the consistent raves about 1 specific restaurant — and plaudits that weren’t always contextualized as “great … for a Disney park place.” That restaurant was Tiffins in Disney’s Animal Kingdom.

Reviewers complimented Tiffins for introducing bold flavors to the bland, lowest-common-denominator palate of theme park eats and for deserving much more attention than it gets from park guests and the park’s marketing department. Fans raved that this was the equivalent of a Michelin-starred gem hidden in Disney World’s least-loved park, a 5-star feast leagues better than the wasteland of chicken fingers and quick-service pizza that stretched around it for miles and miles.

When my family and I visited Disney’s Animal Kingdom for the first time in May 2025, dining at Tiffins was a top priority for me since I wanted to find out if it’s the underrated best restaurant in the most underrated of the Disney Orlando theme parks. So my wife, first-grade son, and I had lunch there one rainy day.

Here’s how that went.

Location of Tiffins

Tiffins is fairly central, in the park’s southwestern corner of Discovery Island. Basically, if you’re at the fork in the Discovery Island main path and face north toward the giant tree, you must take a left and then another left at Pizzafari to turn onto the way to Pandora – The World of Avatar. Tiffins is behind Pizzafari and next to Nomad Lounge.

You need an Animal Kingdom park pass to get to the restaurant, of course. It’s not like you can tell the guys and security guards at the park entrance that you’re just popping into Tiffins for lunch and promise not to have fun on any of the rides or attractions.

Hot Tip:

There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it: An Orlando Disney vacation will cost you big bucks. But you don’t have to mortgage the family home to go this year. Learn how to book a Disney vacation on points and miles, and sprinkle a little pixie dust on your family without breaking the bank.

Booking Tiffins

I booked a reservation at Tiffins by moseying over to the online calendar and checking the available days. I booked several months out and had no trouble finding a lunch slot for our day in the park — remember that Tiffins is one of the restaurants that Disney foodies often consider to be slept upon by far too many people.

Typical weekday hours at Tiffins are 11:30 a.m. to 3:55 p.m. for lunch and 4 to 6 p.m. for dinner. On some days, I noticed dinner was extended to 7 p.m., but there didn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason to when those days were.

Seating

The main entrance to Tiffins opened onto the host stand, which was adorned with — you guessed it — the namesake South Asian lunch boxes.

The Nomad Lounge was to the left, with the main dining room in the other direction.

The restaurant’s theme is exploration and draws inspiration from the age of explorers of the 19th century in India, Africa, and South America. The British Raj period was predominant, for better or worse. I mean, it’s even in the name of the place.

The decor was an eclectic mix of art from the continents of the restaurant’s theme, done up in earth tones and dark woods, giving the place the vibe of a more cramped and frenetic Explorers Club.

The easy-clean, polyester-upholstered tables, chairs, and banquettes may not have been quite up to Sir Reginald Huffingpants III’s lofty standards. However, they were comfortable and still upscale compared to the usual Orlando theme park furniture standards of looking and feeling like they could and possibly had survived the apocalypse or the butts and knees of 100,000 hyperactive grade-schoolers.

It’s worth noting that we’d escaped into the restaurant in the middle of a midday downpour, and yet the floors remained well-maintained and dry. None of the seats were sodden, and no one was shivering from getting soaked in a subtropical rainstorm and transitioning to the cold of overzealous, bone-chilling air conditioning.

Hot Tip:

Pay your bill at Tiffins with the Disney^® Premier Visa^® card or Disney^® Visa^® Card to get 10% off (some exclusions, such as alcoholic beverages and holiday dates, apply).

Food and Beverages

Tiffins bills itself as an “international” restaurant. Usually, that’s a red flag for me, indicating the easily digestible foods that only cater to the daintiest of Western palates (like the banana-pancake joints that backpackers flock to) or fusion foods that dumb down wonderful and distinct cuisines until every dish is basically protein (usually chicken) with slightly differently flavored sauces in varying shades of brown, yellow, red, and green.

But online reviewers assured readers that Tiffins wasn’t an exception, didn’t skimp on the authentic flavors, and didn’t go the one-size-fits-all Sysco route. The thing they seemed to go the most ga-ga about? The can’t-miss order? The bread service.

Here’s the official Tiffins menu. Tiffins is listed as a Plan 2 restaurant on the Disney Dining Plan (DDP).

Starters

Tiffins “signature” bread service ($18) came on a tea service tower with pão de queijo, papadam, and Thai red curry milk bread alongside coconut curry sauce, guava sauce, and ginger-pear chutney.

I’ll cut to the chase: This was highly disappointing.

Pães de queijo are puffs of Brazilian cheese bread that, when you bite into them, reveal a pocket of steam and a luscious, cheesy lava heart that’s immensely rich and satisfying, like biting into little planets of life and flavor.

These, on the other hand, had sat too long and were barely more than room temperature. Instead of the liquid cores, we got dead moons of clammy, rubbery cheese. Likewise, the papadums and milk bread were far from fresh.

The papadums weren’t greasy, which was a good sign. Still, they had gone past the stage where they were restaurant-quality and were firmly at the level of the standard side bag of papadums you get with your Uber Eats delivery from that Indian restaurant that’s probably just a little too far from a reasonable delivery range from your home.

Our takeaway was that, though the cheese bread and papadums had been prepared correctly, they’d sat for 10 or 15 minutes too long before coming to our table. (The milk bread, on the other hand, already seemed too salty and dense.) The ramekins of sauces couldn’t save any of the breads, and we didn’t finish any part of the bread service.

Things improved immediately with the remaining starters.

The pineapple-glazed pork belly with guajillo chili sauce, chicharrónes, and vegetable slaw ($15) was a nice little square of tooth-sticking unctuousness that the slaw cut into nicely, if you wanted that.

But I was more impressed by the charred octopus with sweet corn salsa, chorizo, mole rojo, pickled onions, and cilantro. Octopus is a notoriously tricky meat to get the timing right on, and I had vivid memories of more than one overconfident home chef who ended up with inedible, rubbery messes fit only to be dog chew toys. (Yes, Tater, I’m talking about that time at your place in Astoria.)

Tiffins’ charred octopus, on the other hand, was masterfully done, tender with just the right balance between give and resistance. Good octopus, for me, at least, is all about the texture, and I barely dipped my bites into the earthy mole rojo because the char and the texture were more than enough for me. I wished they’d provided a slice of lemon instead of the pools of red mole. This was my favorite dish of our entire visit to Orlando, and I wolfed it all down.

Mains

Our mains were the butter chicken with chickpea-rice croquette, English peas, yellow squash, and pickled onion ($40) and Moroccan-inspired short rib tagine ($54) over turmeric-scented couscous, golden raisins, grilled artichokes, roasted carrots, and Marcona almonds.

I’m not even going to go into the kids meals or the saga of finding our picky son something he would eat that day. Suffice it to say, there was a makeup dinner that evening, heavy on dishes that even the pickiest of first-graders find acceptable.

The butter chicken was good — not great or memorable among the fabulous dishes put out by the best Indian, Punjabi, or tandoori places of the world, but certainly a solid entry — and a safe choice for pretty much anyone short of the pickiest of first-graders. If I had a single shot at converting a risk-averse friend who I wanted to introduce to authentic South Asian cuisine without permanently turning him or her off to it, this is probably what I’d tell that friend to order.

It was tenderly cooked, rich and sweetish without being cloying, flavorfully spiced with ginger, garlic, tomato sauce, cumin, cardamom, and (I think) cinnamon, garam masala, fenugreek, and cloves without being at all overpowering. I also enjoyed the croquette, which was a starchy, neutral counterpoint to the complex sauciness of the chicken.

The short ribs were flavorful and fall-apart tender, with melt-in-your-mouth meat that had been perfectly seasoned, tasty al dente vegetables, and couscous that was perhaps a tad soupy. It was my favorite entree of the meal.

Desserts

For dessert, we ordered the harvest maple cheesecake ($14), a maple cheesecake mousse with cherry gelée, molasses spice cake, molasses-chai ice cream, pecan crumble, poached pears, maple tuille, and cranberry sauce; and the sticky mango rice ($11) with a mango gelée, lemon verbena-avocado “ice cream,” avocado sauce, and sesame Florentine cookie.

The maple cheesecake was strikingly presented and, somewhat surprisingly for a dessert at a Disney park restaurant, didn’t bash us over the head with sweetness or its signature flavor — it didn’t feel like we’d broken into a sugarbush or Jean Talon market after hours to chug down buckets of très foncé or anything. This was clearly the work of an adept or two who’d spent not a little time as a pastry chef at a high-end restaurant.

With the admirable attention to detail on display on the plate here, though, there was one question we found inescapable: Why was the cookie leaf on top of the maple dessert an elm leaf instead of a maple leaf?

The sweet mango sticky rice was beautiful, elegant, and a popular dessert. I can see how this little tower of cool whites and oranges might stand out as a beacon of taste, understatement, and serenity in the sticky Florida heat and humidity. This was another dessert that was strong on mango flavor but not sickeningly sweet. Again, I can’t commend the sweets team at Tiffins enough for their restraint, especially in a county where the norm is probably for the corn syrup and sugar to flow by the bucket in most back-of-house operations.

The mango gelée was a little firm but not unpleasantly so, and it contrasted texturally nicely with the mock ice cream and the sticky rice base. It took me a couple of bites to figure out the best way to experience this dessert was to get a wedge with a little slice of every layer at once, with the mango gelée almost more of an accent to the sticky rice than the star attraction. I tried incorporating the Florentine biscuit into a couple of forkfuls, too, but found it too chunky, dense, and overwhelmingly sesame-flavored to be pleasant.

The result was a smooth silkiness of the mango layer and fragrant mushiness of the sticky rice layer being mixed in with and then dissipating to give way to the pebbly graininess of the sesame and cracker crumbs, mainly reminding me of the “Simpsons” throwaway gag about nuts and gum.

I know I said I’d skip the kids meals in this review, but our son’s meal did come with a dessert: a gluten- and nut-free Oreo brownie with a creamy cookies-and-cream cube on a chocolate-cookie crust and chocolate coins on top.

I found the texture of the Oreo-flavored brownie to be off-putting. It was somehow overly processed and sweet, with a texture somewhere between oleaginous and toothpaste — more like something you’d make with a recipe on the side of a box of Jell-O than something you’d bake from scratch. But I also kept in mind that this wasn’t just specifically a kids menu dessert but also a gluten- and wheat-free sweet. And judging by how our son finished this, the kitchen had clocked kids’ palates correctly.

The plating for everything was eclectic and attractive, with interesting patterns and textures, so we didn’t have to shuffle through the generic, standardized, white plates we’d come to expect from most theme parks nowadays — at least the ones that haven’t gone fully disposable.

Hot Tip:

Looking to make Disney’s Animal Kingdom the centerpiece of your Orlando visit? Consider staying on-site — but read our review of Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge first.

Service

From the hostess to our waiter and the food runners, the staff was friendly if somewhat perfunctory. There were plenty of smiles but little or no small talk. It was the middle of the lunch rush, and every staff member seemed to have plenty of tables to attend to, lots to do, and little time for anything else. We didn’t get much follow-up attention or check-ups on how we were doing after each course was brought out.

There are 5-star restaurants where you can expect a soliloquy on the provenance of the cloudy, homemade Hungarian backyard wine that the sommelier has chosen to accompany your oysters. Then there are quick-service restaurants where the server slaps down the bill alongside your greasy hash browns and black coffee. This was somewhere north of the median of this spectrum, but we never shook the feeling that the priority was clearing tables over curated guest experiences. This is fine, especially when dealing with a theme park eatery. Still, it made me wonder about the baseline dining experiences of the people who claimed this was a white tablecloth restaurant.

Final Thoughts

Yes, Tiffins is probably the best and most underrated restaurant not just in Disney’s Animal Kingdom but in all of Disney’s Orlando theme parks. On the other hand, no, this isn’t a Michelin-star level restaurant (and I’d be a little skeptical that anyone who makes that claim has actually been to many Michelin-starred restaurants).

But when you’ve spent dozens of hours traipsing around Disney or other Orlando parks in the culinary equivalent of bowling with the bumpers in and almost nothing tastes more challenging than a Lunchable (except with additional cupfuls of sugar per serving), then it’s totally fair to call Tiffins a foodie oasis that is a must-go for any adult in Animal Kingdom who’s sick of chicken fingers and greasy pizza slices for every meal.