Paddlefish — Restaurant in Lake Buena Vista

So you and your significant are in Disney Springs on a Friday evening. Your both hungry but with no reservations made. Your thinking what on earth are we going to do? Wait lists are probably so long you’ll be eating breakfast before you get a table! Let me give you hope in one word: Paddlefish! While I cannot guarantee anything they always seem to work us in. The staff is absolutely awesome!

When you walk in you really get a feel for river boating. Not the nostalgic old river boating but a modern decor river boat experience. The ambiance is very nice. This is an important part of enjoying your dinner. Understanding the theming of your restaurant. Immersion into the “story” of the restaurant. Paddlefish has it down. Very open feel, windows surround you with a view of Disney Springs(ask for upper deck seating). The evening view is beautiful. Tables and seating are comfortable and spaced reasonably well.

The meal. Oh the MEAL! It was amazing, exquisite, hands down one of my favorites! Very presentation. When on a river boat what do you order first, a drink of course! Now here’s a secret that many don’t know, the Mai Tai. This is a hidden gem that is not on the menu and unless you know to ask for it you won’t enjoy this ambrosial drink( it came in second place on our Pub Crawl one year). You have to ask your bartender or wait staff for the “old Mai Tai they used to serve years ago”. The bartender will know, the wait staff unless they are new will know. So you know, it’s not a typical Mai Tai! Not even close! I got my wife one and I ordered the Cucumber Lemonade non alcoholic. It’s very good, very refreshing and not a powder mix.

We then ordered our meal. We had the Calamari for an appetizer. No tentacles! Nicely cut body portions and tender yet still slightly firm. Perfect. Breading was unique and a nice coating. Not overwhelming. The Peppadew Peri-Peri is an excellent mash sauce, very nice compliment. We both ordered salads as well. My wife ordered the Caesar, which she loved and I ordered the side Wedge Salad. Excellent! Cold crisp lettuce, wedge salads need to have a wedge of cold lettuce it’s so important. Crumbled bacon crisp yet not crunchy, excellently done. Very nice blue cheese sauce with just the right amount of very good quality blue cheese crumbles. For main course my wife’s first choice was to stick with a familiar, the fried shrimp, I convinced her to order the Stuffed Cod. (This is my best advice to you, don’t go for safe typical familiar foods. Explore, be adventurous, and you will be rewarded.) I ordered the Scallops. You can find the accompaniments with these meals on their website. Excellent presentation and just the right portions. The flavors were heavenly! Wow! I know what your thinking, scallops are well just scallops. However, it’s the accompaniments that you eat with the scallops that blew my taste buds into another dim. The scallops themselves were very high quality and cooked to perfection. My wife’s Stuffed Cod was…WOW! Cod, if not cooked just right, can be a mush monster. But this, compliments to our chef! Perfection! The cornbread stuffing with shrimp and scallops was such a unique mix and added so well to the flavor adventure.(ask for the Parmesan Crème sauce as an accompaniment). My wife was very happy that she didn’t get the fried shrimp. VERY! We did order the Key Lime pie and Cheesecake, but took them back to our resort for later. Both were excellent.

I have to end with out waiter, Robert from NYC! He made two new life long friends. He has his job down to a true profession. You are friends invited to his boat for a meal. He made us feel so welcomed. He is the reason we ordered what we did. He KNOWS his dishes! Robert you are the best! He doesn’t work weekends, so if you go during the week, ASK FOR HIM! What really impressed me was his attention to our progress of the evening. He took our order and then allowed us to eat each course over a relaxed time. He held ordering each course as he monitored my wife’s and I conversation while we ate. This is rare!...

This restaurant was reserved for my birthday and I'm so glad it was. Located in Disney Springs, you will be required to mask up anywhere within the premises. As such, after several hours of walking around with a mask on in the Florida summer heat, you will be ready to take it off, especially for a good meal and cold drink.

That's where we were. We checked in for our reservation and were escorted to the top floor. We were only the second table to be seated in the place, which was marked off for only half of the normal capacity. You will be seated at least 6' from the nearest group and likely more.

Kim was our waitress and was very helpful in her advice about the menu. We went directly to our orders - Fried Catfish, Shrimp Pasta, a Catfish sandwich and a wedge salad. While awaiting the arrival of these, a neighboring table informed us that we should try the crab guacamole. Being good listeners, we did exactly that. The guacamole is served with spiced tortilla chips and a generous helping of crab guacamole. It was more than enough for four of us to get started with on our meal.

The food arrived next and there were no regrets. The catfish was everything I expected it to be with crispy fried catfish, excellent rice and a succotash that I had never had. It had edamame, huge smoky chunks of bacon and corn. I could have probably made a meal of that alone. My wife had the Shrimp Pasta which she enjoyed, although it was served extremely hot from the oven and took a while to cool down enough to eat. Our guests enjoyed their meals as well, although the catfish sandwich was not quite to his liking because of the texture of the fish. Mine was excellent, so I don't know what the difference was.

Once the waitress found out that it was my birthday, she brought a complimentary piece of cheesecake to the table. I am not a cheesecake fan, so when I say this cheesecake was delicious, hear what I'm saying. I shared it with my table, mostly, but still managed to eat at least half of it myself.

The restaurant was everything I'd hoped it would be and when I come back, not if, I will definitely ask for Kim. Especially if you order crab legs. I watched her spend the time to serve the neighboring table and crack and pick the meat from their legs for them. That's service!

Update: We were so enthused about this place from our dinner visit that we tried it again for lunch. Great decision. On our previous visit, the wedge salad was well-received by our dinner guest, so my wife ordered that, while I got the Caprese Sandwich.

It's funny how often I find a new food that I think I could pick for my last meal and the Caprese Sandwich is the newest addition. It is a Ciabatta roll, with a basil aioli sauce, tomatos and mozzarella cheese. There is nothing I could recommend to improve this sandwich, except to keep bringing them. If you are going to get one, be forewarned that it is very messy, but also delicious. The ciabatta is just chewy enough to give it a meaty texture and the aioli is good enough that I could make a sandwich of this alone. Of course, you can get fries with it, which completes the package just right.

The wedge salad was apparently as good as had been reviewed by our guest. It came with a goodly supply of bacon and blue cheese dressing to add to it. Highly recommended it seems.

The waitress offered a Mango & Passionfruit tea. She claimed that many people reject it. My only guess is that it is because it is unsweetened, and this is the south after all. I enjoyed it. It was very refreshing and of course, you can always add sugar if that's to your taste.

Of course, the staff was friendly and the server, Natalia was a lovely person, being very friendly and stopping by numerous times to check on our progress or needs. As with many other things during this time, the staff are masked and gloved and can be difficult to hear occasionally, but we managed just fine.

Trip number three...

We “dined” here on 07.10.25 and that’s putting it generously seeing as we didn’t eat at all. Reservations were made through the Disney app so we were no way a walk in, and there was tones of availability in the app so they weren’t busy that night. We were sat in a room clearly allocated for families with young children even though ours are 8 & 12. The room was horribly bright, no atmosphere, loud and we were sat right in the middle so not even a window to look at. Like a cafeteria We were sat down and our waiter at first was lovely. He went over the menu and was very knowledgeable on everything and suggested a bottle of wine. After that it all fell apart. Our table then seemed to be given to a new waiter who seemed overwhelmed. She eventually took our order and we got our wine, my son got a cola and my daughter was happy with water. My son eventually got his soup about 20 minutes after we sat down, he was the only one to order a starter. Then nothing for an hour! She would appear 3 times to say our food was coming right now, but never did. Never offered to top up our drinks, nothing. My daughter sat for an hour and 20 minutes with nothing but water a bread. By 8:20 we were fed up. The kids were exhausted and the notion of dinner had passed. After sitting in a brightly lit, cafeteria style room for so long, I just wanted out. The food came just as we were about to get up and leave and everything was stone cold and dry. My son’s skewers were cold and tough and daughter’s pasta had gone “claggy”. Husbands fish was cold and dry and my scallops, although looks delicious, were cold. Everything had obviously been sitting under a heat lamp for ages, but they still served it hoping we would just eat it and not complain. It’s worth mentioning that several tables had come in after us, ordered and were eating way before us. We flagged another lady and explained we had been waiting for such a long time and before even saying it was cold she interjected and said “your food is cold isn’t it?”, so they knew, but served it anyways hoping we’d be too polite to say anything. Our meal was comped but we still paid for the wine and a comment was made to suggest we still tip the waiter!! We didn’t eat, left hungry and pissed off. We only had 4 nights in Disney and completely wasted one here. If you have kids, no matter their age or how well behaved they are I just wouldn’t bother here. You’ll get punted I’ll to the dirty “family room” with no view or atmosphere. It’s a shame because I think if the food hadn’t been sitting for so long I think it would have been delicious. If we’d been given a decent table and the waiter just been honest with us then you’d be surprised how understanding people are. If she’d just said, the kitchen is having problems, it’s going to be another 30 minutes and offered us something in the meantime, we wouldn’t have walked out and we would have paid in full. We would have been happy enough to wait if there was any honest communication at all, but there...