NEWS: Nod to EPCOT History Revealed Inside the Park's NEW Restaurant

We have learned a lot about EPCOT‘s new Connections Café and Eatery recently!

Sign’s up!

We now know that the new restaurant will open this spring, and the café will be a Starbucks location as well. Earlier this week, we got a new EPCOT park map that lists Connections Café and Eatery under the dining section. Today we’re learning more about the special nods to Disney’s history that you’ll see inside once this spot opens!

To see what we’re talking about, you’ll need to look DOWN when you visit Connections Café. That’s right, Imagineers love to add special touches to the flooring at Disney World, and they’ve done it again!

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A post shared by Zach Riddley (@thezachriddley)

Imagineer Zach Riddley shared this image of Walt Disney with some of the original site plans for EPCOT, along with pics of the floor designs in progress. He says that the flooring at Connections Café and Eatery will “pay homage to the radial layout and celebrate the purposeful geometry and organic symmetry of EPCOT.”

Connections Cafe and Eatery ©Disney

The flooring designs were 3-D printed out of a sustainable biopolymer material and then used as inlays in the poured flooring. “EPCOT is full of iconic shape language that evokes grand ideas about cities, innovation and the potential for design to make the world a better, more integrated place,” Riddley said.

This is a good SIGN that construction is coming along!

UPDATE: Riddley has shared even more details about the floors at Connections Cafe & Eatery in a new Instagram post. The post once again starts with a photo of Walt from the EPCOT film that was released in 1967.

©Zach Riddley via Instagram (@thezachriddley)

Riddley shares that the spirit of Walt’s vision for EPCOT — “that Walt Disney World and EPCOT would be a place where the power of possibility would inspire the world” — has lived on. Riddley notes that Imagineers drew inspiration from Walt’s Florida project master plan for the flooring inlay at Connections Eatery.

©Zach Riddley via Instagram (@thezachriddley)

If you look closely, you may even see the intersection of the I-4 and U.S. 192 highways (these are represented by orange lines).

©Zach Riddley via Instagram (@thezachriddley)

The linework shows original ideas for EPCOT, Magic Kingdom, and more. We can’t wait to see this full design once it’s all done!

Connections Café will be EPCOT’s newest quick-service restaurant when it opens this spring. Disney has previously announced that the eatery will have “show kitchens” and that the menu will reflect the common bonds shared over food that cross cultural lines. Keep following Disney Food Blog for the latest Disney dining news!

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