AntSol Travel

At the D23 Expo, Disney’s official fan club & expo, at the Disney Parks panel, they announced two SoCal restaurants would open Porto’s in Downtown Disney, I covered their Buena Park location before, but I will make a blog post about Porto’s, and now Great Maple, a higher-end sit-down brunch restaurant chain with five locations in SoCal. The sixth location would be at the newly renovated Pixar Place Hotel, formerly the Paradise Pier Hotel, replacing the PCH Grill Great Maple is known for their Maple Bacon Doughnuts, which you can get for $14 for three and can be suitable for one person’s lunch like I did. 

Great Maple is a popular restaurant and reservations are recommended for larger groups, however, if you were just eating at the bar yourself or with another person, you should be fine there, especially on a weekday lunchtime. Reservations can be made on their OpenTable site. I got there at 11:30 am on a Wednesday, so seating was actually not an issue unless you wanted patio seating, which was packed, and the bar and inside seating were not too packed. I sat at the bar and the server, David, was attentive and helped answer my questions. 

The menu is not cheap to date to put it frankly, coffee is $6, appetizers average $10, the most expensive items are the entrées at $22, 16 oz pour of beer is $8 which is cheaper than California Adventure that would be double the price. I got three doughnuts for $14, the maple bacon doughnuts were delicious but really sweet for one sitting, It is more of an appetizer for a larger group. I also got a $6 Fair Trade coffee, at least I know the coffee was sourced and sold at a fair price for the coffee bean farmers. Since I was bike riding both ways, I could not get a beer, but they do offer several SoCal breweries, including Anaheim’s Brewery X Ducks Beer, the official beer of the Anaheim Ducks.

Overall, the coffee & doughnuts were good but not cheap, and neither is anything else on their menu are not cheap. However, Great Maple is a SoCal-based higher-end sit-down restaurant chain, with this location in Newport Beach, the more expensive zip code in Orange County, so it is bound to be expensive anyway with staff wages, inflating food costs, and rent. When Great Maple opens at the Pixar Pier Hotel, I am it will be popular, but their menu will be just as expensive, maybe even cost a bit more.

Surprisingly, Great Maple liked my Instagram post, even though, I said food there was too expensive.