In the spirit of Halloween Time at the Disneyland Resort, Pacific Wharf Cafe is offering a Bacon Cheddar Ale Soup served in their famous sourdough bread bowl. How is a bacon cheddar ale soup related to Halloween? I have no idea, but that doesn’t really matter because this soup is fantastic!
The soup is rich, creamy, and full of bacon. I could probably just end this review here by saying that it’s better than Le Cellier’s Cheddar Cheese Soup at Canada in Epcot. I don’t know what kind of beer they use in this soup, nor what kind of bacon (Le Cellier advertises that they use Moosehead and Nueske’s, respectively). But this soup tastes better, has a better, more noticeable beer flavor, and has way more bacon than Le Cellier’s. Don’t let the beer flavor worry you though – both of my kids (who definitely don’t like beer) loved this soup.
After you finish off the soup, Pacific Wharf Cafe also offers a dessert option for Halloween Time, a pumpkin bread pudding.
While the soup was amazing, I sadly can’t say the same for the bread pudding. My issue with it was that it tasted like coffee. I thought for sure my kids were going to hate the soup and like the bread pudding, but it turned out to be the exact opposite. This had such a strong coffee flavor that it almost overwhelmed any pumpkin flavor.
Whether the “pumpkin spice” bread pudding was supposed to be a “pumpkin spice coffee” bread pudding, or whether someone just spilled their coffee in the batch in the kitchen, I don’t know. I do think fans of pumpkin spice coffee would love this bread pudding. It just wasn’t advertised that way, so it really was a big surprise to my palate.