Disney Springs is the place to go for great food, shopping, and live entertainment.

Whether you want to grab a sweet treat from Sprinkles or dine at Morimoto Asia, there are a lot of good eats at Disney Springs. There are also limited-time offerings, like Raglan Road’s annual Labor Day Weekend celebration. We attended a media event for The Great Irish Hooley — take a look!

From September 1st through the 4th, you can celebrate Raglan Road Irish Pub & Restaurant’s 11th Annual Great Irish Hooley Music Fest! The fest is filled with singing, dancing, entertainment, food, and drinks. 

But of course, we’re going to focus on the food and drinks! The Great Irish Hooley has 3 featured drinks and 6 featured dishes. 

We tried the Heart of the Hooley, which is a drink made with Keepers Heart Irish Bourbon, blackberry and mint puree, and sour, topped with ginger beer. This drink was very light, with just a hint of sweetness. The idea behind the drink is that blackberries are in season this time of year in Ireland. Our reporter isn’t a fan of ginger beer but thought the flavor of it in this particular cocktail was mild, so it’s not overbearing. We’d say this is the PERFECT summer cocktail.

You can also get the Sooth My Achy Heart Flight, which includes Keepers Heart Irish Bourbon, Keepers Heart Irish American, and Keepers Heart Irish Bourbon Cask Strength. We did not try these because we’re not big bourbon fans, but everyone we talked to said these were all delicious, but the Keepers Heart Irish Bourbon seemed to be the clear winner of the four.

Okay, on to the food. First, we’ll tell you that some of the portion sizes for the savory food we got were smaller sampler sizes, and the actual dish sizes are bigger.

Okay, on with the food! The Crispy Cream Goat Cheese Salad is made with crispy fried goat cheese with pickled carrot, squash, and arugula salad, pear and shallot relish, blackberries, candied pecans, and quinoa crunch, served with a honey mustard dressing. The goat cheese was heavenly: crispy on the outside and then nice and creamy on the inside. The dressing on the salad is nice and light and it added to to the complex flavors of the salad. The berries and pecans just made it all that much more delightful.

The Seafood Sharing Board included:

• Whiskey and brown sugar cured BBQ smoked salmon
• Sesame-crusted tuna with soy, ginger, and chili dressing
• Cod, salmon, and smoked haddock fish cakes with chunky tartar sauce
• Kiss Before Shrimp with confit cherry tomatoes

So our favorite part of this board was the BBQ salmon — it’s got a thick sauce on it that’s just PRIME BBQ flavor. The fish cakes are from the regular Raglan Road menu — but you will need to like fish flavors to enjoy them because they do taste like…well…fish. The shrimp is served at room temperature, and we found it loaded with flavor. The tuna is also a Raglan Road regular menu item. We found it was cooked to perfection and the avocado sauce on top added a nice subtle touch.

We also got to try the Dalkey Dog, which is actually a menu item you can find regularly at Cookes of Dublin. It’s Beer battered Irish pork sausage with Dalkey mustard mayonnaise, Buffalo apple sauce, pickles, and crunchy fried onions. We have always been fans of this, so we’ll just tell you now that the Dalkey Dog was our favorite thing to eat at the Hooley. The Buffalo apple sauce has such a nice flavor and blends so well with the pork. Also, the beer batter gives it a nice crunchy texture, while the onions on top add one more element of flavor.

The Loaded Bang Bang Fries are also a menu item from Cookes of Dublin. They’re made with Crispy chicken, onions, peppers, and our spicy bang bang mayonnaise. Y’all, these should be on both menus — that bang bang sauce made our mouths SING. Then you get that crispy chicken and it’s just all PERFECTION. We would make a special trip to Disney Springs for these fries.

The Hog in a Box can also be found at Cookes. It’s slow-roasted pork shoulder with baby potatoes, sage and sweet onion stuffing, caramelized onions, and apple sauce. Can we say comfort food? The pork is tender and has a wonderful smokey yet sweet flavor. We did find the stuffing a TAD dry, but when you mix it with the apple sauce, it all works out in the end.

So, on to dessert because you ALWAYS have to have a little something sweet, right? We had the Strawberry Cheesecake, which is also at Cookes. It’s a creamy cheesecake on a waffle cookie crust, served with fresh strawberries, strawberry whipped cream, and rainbow sprinkles. This is a BIG slice of cheesecake. The waffle cookie crust is BRILLIANT and makes it feel even more decadent. The crust basically took what is pretty much a basic cheesecake and leveled it up a notch.

You also get some special entertainment during the festival, depending on when you visit. You’ll get live music and dancers throughout the weekend.

We enjoyed some live music while we were there.

If you want to dig into these featured dishes and drinks or take part in the festivities, the Great Irish Hooley will last through September 4th! 

And, as always, stay tuned to DFB for the latest Disney news!

 

Which of these items would you be excited to try? Let us know below. 

Disclosure: In nearly all circumstances, Disney Food Blog writers and photographers pay full price for their own travel, hotel, food, beverage, and event tickets. We do this because it’s important to us as journalists to ensure not only that we give you unbiased opinions, but also that you can trust us to do so since we’re paying our own way. On rare occasions, when we are invited by a company to attend a preview as media, and when we choose to accept that invitation, we will always make you, our readers, aware of that situation. Today, we were invited by Disney World to attend their media preview of Raglan Road’s Great Irish Hooley. Note that when we attend events as media we are 1) Not required to review that event/food on any of our channels, and 2) Not required to review that event/food favorably. You can always count on DFB to give you a 100% unbiased and honest review of any event that we attend, food that we eat, or beverage that we drink. You can see more in our Disclosure Policy. Thank you for reading. — AJ

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