“If you can dream it, you can do it.” ~Construction worker (singular) who is building the Cake Bake Shop on the BoardWalk at Walt Disney World when asked if the restaurant and bakery could open before Villains Land at Magic Kingdom debuts in 2030.
I’m kidding, of course. Not only did he not say that, but I actually saw as many as three (3!!!) construction workers simultaneously on-site at the Cake Bake Shop over the course of the last week. Not only that, but I observed visible progress taking shape between my visits to the BoardWalk as I took breaks from the 2024 EPCOT Food & Wine Festival to check out the project.
I guess now that construction has concluded on Blue Ribbon Corn Dog, the other colossal construction project at BoardWalk, resources have been reallocated to expedite the Cake Bake Shop. If it only took like a year to repurpose a waterside kiosk, they should be able to finish the conversion this restaurant by 2030–piece of cake!
In terms of basic background for those who haven’t been following this multi-year saga, the Cake Bake Shop by Gwendolyn Rogers is a new table service restaurant at Walt Disney World that actually should open in 2024. (For real this time.) It’ll offer sit-down dining and a bakery, replacing ESPN Club at the BoardWalk.
The Cake Bake Shop Restaurant will feature both savory and dessert menus, along with afternoon tea service, in a whimsical atmosphere that complements the magic of the idyllic charm of Disney’s BoardWalk Inn that guests know and love. This new concept will serve up storybook sweet treats and dreamy desserts, as The Cake Bake Shop by Gwendolyn Rogers makes a “seaside splash” at Disney’s BoardWalk.
(Throughout this post are construction photos I took during the last week of August and first week of September 2024.)
In addition to construction progress, we have a new development on the Cake Bake Shop, which filed another new permit to begin work on installing the restaurant’s kitchen within the last couple of weeks. This is one of several construction permits that’ve been served up in order to basically rebuild ESPN Club over the course of the last couple years.
The construction permit for the kitchen lists Johnson Lancaster and Associates, Inc. as the contractor. This is, unsurprisingly, a top-rated food service contractor renowned for its expertise in the field of commercial kitchen design, construction, and renovation. The company caters to a broad spectrum of clients which comprises restaurant owners, fast food chains, and catering businesses across the United States. They’ve done business in the past with both Universal and Walt Disney World.
I don’t know how long a commercial kitchen normally takes to install, but it probably doesn’t matter since nothing is normal about the Cake Bake Shop. Even assuming a normal industrial kitchen could be completed in a few weeks, it could take a few months or a year on this project. When the Cake Bake Shop announced they’d open in a year, I think they meant a dog year.
Earlier this year, the Cake Bake Shop started hiring. I expressed shock at that development at the time, as it suggested (based on standard lead times for other Walt Disney World restaurants) that the Cake Bake Shop would be open by June. Obviously, that did not happen or you wouldn’t be reading this post.
At the time, I pegged the opening sometime between October 2024 and Spring 2025 based on progress up until that point and the assumption it’d continue at a similar pace. I cannot overstate just how slowly work has progressed. It’s going to end up taking about the same amount of time to reimagine ESPN Club into Cake Bake Shop as it did to build EPCOT Center!
The Cake Bake Shop by Gwendolyn Rogers was previously slated to open last year, before updating its official website to early 2024, then just 2024. Now simply says that it’s “Coming Soon.” How soon is probably a matter of perspective. If you’re going from the dawn of recorded time, Cake Bake Shop debuting alongside Villains Land in 2030 is still pretty soon! It’s all relative.
Joking aside, between the latest developments with hiring and permits, paired with my observations of construction progress, I’m now a lot more comfortable predicting that Cake Bake Shop actually will open in 2024.
I still think the early end of the range is sometime in October. With that being a month away and work still being done to the exterior, it seems like a safe bet that the restaurant won’t open this month. Even sometime in October (meaning anytime between Walt Disney World’s anniversary and Halloween) would be a fairly aggressive timeframe for a project that has been anything but aggressive.
The later range of that “sometime in 2024” prediction would obviously be New Year’s Eve, which is the last day of the calendar year. Given everything we’ve seen (or not) in the last two years with this construction project, that’s the best bet. Well actually, the real best bet is probably the opening slipping into 2025.
However, even as someone who has turned the Cake Bake Shop into a punchline, I’m much more bullish. Even though I think every effort will be made to get it done by October and convention/group events season, my precise prediction is that the Cake Bake Shop opens by mid-November 2024.
The reasons for my newfound confidence in the opening timeline are twofold. First, there’s stupidity. I haven’t learned my lesson with this project and am foolishly thinking this time will be different.
Second, I spent an inordinate amount of time watching work over the last week, and it really is moving in an expeditious manner. In fact, this is the fastest I’ve ever seen construction happen on this project. It now looks like it’s being built by sloths instead of snails!
It’s not fast fast, like Epic Universe, but it’s a pace not seen before with the Cake Bake Shop.
It seems like there’s a new sense of urgency, and with that, I’d hazard a guess that there’s also a strong desire to get this restaurant open during the peak quarter of the year. (Keep in mind that this is a third party project–meaning that they dictate the construction schedule, but also that they’ve been paying rent to Disney this whole time. That can’t be cheap!)
I guess we shall see what happens, but that’s my prediction: that Cake Bake Shop opens between October and December 2024, with the most likely target right in the middle of that range, in mid-November. Of course anything is possible, but I really don’t think it’ll get delayed again into 2025.
For those who haven’t followed this project closely, the Cake Bake Shop construction has somehow moved even slower than CommuniCore Hall in EPCOT. It’s impressive, in its own sort of sad way.
In the Cake Bake Shop’s “defense” (sort of), this has been way more than a simple conversion. The structure of the former ESPN Club was been taken down to the studs, and the cupola atop the building was entirely rebuilt. Even though it’ll end up looking fairly similar to what it replaced, a lot of work was put into transforming and remaking the venu.
Still, that doesn’t fully explain the lethargic pace of work. Were this a normal project in normal times, it would’ve opened last year. But it wasn’t. It’s my understanding that there were multiple issues getting it finished. The big one was labor shortages for construction projects in Central Florida.
Another was the necessary prerequisite of completing a new 31,200-square-foot commercial bakery in Osceola County. The offsite bakery is critical to supporting the Cake Bake Shop, and is the only way to produce the volume of baked goods necessary for the restaurant while ensures quality. The BoardWalk restaurant kitchen will focus solely on the savory menu items.
The Cake Bake Shop is best known for its colossal 3-layer cakes, each of which takes up to six hours to complete because they’re all hand-stacked, hand-decorated and hand-cut. The Cake Bake Shop sells 12 varieties each day. Due to the number of cakes, anticipated volume of the BoardWalk location, and labor-intensive nature of the desserts, the commercial bakery was necessary. It’s our understanding that they first focused resources on the commercial bakery, and now attention has been redirected to the BoardWalk restaurant.
Honestly, hearing about that colossal commercial bakery gives me a bit of pause and makes me fear that the Cake Bake Shop has overextended. That story immediately reminded me of Ample Hills, which took on a tremendous debt load to build a colossal manufacturing space that was way bigger than needed. That dragged down their entire business, and led to the closure of the BoardWalk location–and eventual bankruptcy.
Hopefully the only parallel here is the location at BoardWalk. From everything we’ve heard, the Cake Bake Shop’s current restaurants in Indianapolis are money-printing machines, and it seems like this will be a smash success. But at the same time, just because the products are pricey doesn’t mean the business is profitable. Especially if there’s a tremendous debt load from taking 2+ years to build a restaurant and commercial bakery.
In any case, hopefully construction continues at the current clip and the Cake Bake Shop opens in Fall 2024. We can’t wait to eat here!
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YOUR THOUGHTS
What’s your predicted opening date/month/year for the Cake Bake Shop by Gwendolyn Rogers? Am I crazy to think it could open as early as next month…or in 2024, at all? Excited for this new bakery and restaurant or will you miss ESPN Club? Do you agree or disagree with our assessment? Other thoughts or concerns? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
