For the uninitiated — or those who don’t follow challenge cooking shows — Masaharu Morimoto is a star of the programs Iron Chef in Japan and its spinoff Iron Chef America. He has several restaurants that bear his name around the world, including in Mumbai, New Delhi, Philadelphia, New York and Mexico City. Those restaurants are named simply Morimoto and feature the chef’s signature Japanese cuisine. (The nearest Morimoto is in Boca Raton.)

The Disney Springs restaurant is Morimoto Asia to distinguish it from the other restaurants. Technically, the restaurant is operated by the Patina Restaurant Group, which also has the two restaurants at Epcot’s Italy pavilion as well as others throughout the country, including Lincoln at New York’s Lincoln Center. My sources told me that the Disney restaurant started out to be a genuine Morimoto but that the chef became disenchanted with the bureaucracy and chose to continue under a licensing agreement.

Narcoossee’s has always been something of a disappointment to me. I always left it wishing it had been better than it was, which was mostly so-so.

But now the restaurant is on a new path. The chef has refreshed the menu, and it seems the kitchen has a renewed interest in turning out more exciting dishes. If you’re really adventurous, try the crispy whole snapper, presented as though swimming on your plate. If that’s too graphic, have the togarashi-spiced tuna and jumbo prawn. If the roasted beet salad is available, grab it.

Now serving a very pleasant waterfront brunch. Read about that here: http://goo.gl/ZVqxjb

Recently remodeled, Nine Dragons is probably the easiest restaurant at Epcot to get in to without a reservation. That’s because to so many people Chinese food is not equated with fine dining — it’s something that comes in a cardboard container and you get it for takeout. This is different, more of an upscale Chinese dining experience.I popped in for a lunch and started with a bowl of chicken consomme with pork dumplings, a golden broth with a rich mouthfeel. It had two big dumplings of chewy dough filled with well-spiced ground pork.
For my entree I had the shrimp with spinach noodles, which looked very much like something you’d find served in the Italy pavilion. (But remember that Marco Polo is said to have introduced Italians to pasta after a voyage to China.) The noodles were fettuccinelike and were mixed with red and green sauteed bell peppers and dotted with flecks of hot pepper flakes and topped with cool, fesh coriander.
The shrimp had a thin film of crispiness and peppery spice.
For dessert there was a sponge cake with fruit filling that was slightly dry.

After a year-long renovation, Planet Hollywood has been refurbished to resemble a large observatory to better fit in with the Disney Springs backstory. (Never mind that it’s really a planetarium.) Inside, it’s a little like dining in an IMAX theater, with massive projections of music videos that stretch the three-story auditorium/dining room.

Food Network star Guy Fieri contributed to the new menu. Food is impressive mostly in the size of the portion.

You’ll find traditional music, familiar ales and even genuine fittings from old bars in Ireland, but the food is an updated version of Irish classics, some a bit highfalutin.

For example, we started our dinner with a seared scallop on a mint and pea puree. Just saying the words mint and pea puree will get you thrown out of most pubs in Dublin. But it was tasty, as was the potato and asparagus soup, lighter and smoother than you’d expect.

The next course was shepherd’s pie, but as I said before, things aren’t done in a traditional way at Raglan Road, and this was certainly the oddest shepherd’s pie I’ve seen. Here, the ground meat mixed with gravy was dolloped onto a large spoon with a little mashed potatoes piped on top. It was a little more than one should shove into one’s mouth all at once, but there wasn’t quite enough to reallly get a feel for the flavor.

Whatever you have for dinner be sure to have the bread pudding for dessert. And the house band, which performs nightly, will make you want to get up and dance without moving your arms.

The Four Seasons Resort’s three-mealer has an impersonal and cold decor, and the food is only marginal (deep-fried veal Milanese?). Other than that…

An Orlando outpost for a multi-location New York City restaurant, this is a rather mundane place with average Mexican food.

Seemingly out of nowhere, a big new JW Marriott has appeared and along with it a pretty darned good restaurant, Sear + Sea Woodfire Grill.

The hotel is a new neighbor of other large hotels like the Waldorf Astoria, Hilton and Wyndham in the area known as Bonnet Creek. In fact, if you sit on the restaurant’s comfortably spacious veranda, as I did on my recent visit, you’ll have a view of the actual creek and its woody banks just below.

As you might deduce from the clever name, Sear + Sea is a steak and seafood restaurant, which might sound a bit ho-hum at first. But the menu, under the direction of chef de cuisine Alex Pyser, is creative and appealing.

It’s big, it’s loud, it’s splashy, and it’s more than a little cheesy, but T-Rex can be a lot of fun, especially for kids old enough not to be frightened out of the bejeebers by life-sized animatronic prehistoric lizards. The food is basic, nothing fancy, nothing stellar. But all in all it does a better job than its sister restaurant Rainforest Cafe.

I sampled a soup and entree. The entrée had two items that are offered separately on the menu, barbecued ribs and rotisserie chicken. The soup was a tomato basil, listed on the menu as lava tomato basil. Turns out lava is fairly sweet; who knew?

The ribs, a generous half slab, were tender and the bones easily relinquished the meat, but there wasn’t a lot of distinctive flavoring. The same was true of the chicken, an even more generous half bird. It was nicely cooked and had juicy flesh. But there were no seasonings, no flavor. It’s a common problem with restaurants in tourist areas to dumb down the seasonings so as not to offend the common palate. Pity. The platter also included a healthy portion of waffle-cut fries. Maybe healthy isn’t the right word, but you know what I mean.

Teppan is short for teppanyaki, the Japanese steakhouse style meal where you sit around a large grill with a bunch of strangers while a cook makes a big show of chopping your vegetables and grilling them with a lot of banging and clattering. Fun. The food is good, but ultimately overpriced.