The Hungry Bear Restaurant in Critter Country re-opened recently with a new menu, featuring some new and rather unusual menu items. Lee and I tried some of them on our visit last weekend.

The previous Hungry Bear menu offered your basic burgers and fries – nothing too exciting. The new menu still has burgers and fries, but the burgers are Angus beef burgers and are served with sweet potato fries. In addition to the regular cheeseburger there is a Pioneer Cheeseburger that is topped with homemade chili and a hand-battered onion ring. Lee tried that and said it was excellent. He took a bite of the burger patty all by itself and said that it was really good – normally theme park burgers are not very tasty. The sweet potato fries were also excellent – they were crisp and flavorful and not soggy at all. Really good. I was never even offered a bite of the onion ring, but it looked wonderful.

The new “signature” item on the menu is the Fried Green Tomato sandwich, and that’s what I ordered. It has cornmeal crusted fried green tomatoes layered with two slices of fresh tomato with havarti cheese, remoulade, jicama-mango slaw and served on a multi-grain roll. It comes with choice of sweet potato fries or zesty slaw – I ordered the slaw. The fried tomatoes were quite good – didn’t taste like tomato at all, though. They were crunchy but not greasy. Unfortunately the jicama-mango slaw contained slices of red pepper, which I don’t like – I picked them out and enjoyed the sandwich without them. The “zesty slaw” turned out to be the jicama-mango slaw – so that meant more red peppers. I should’ve ordered the sweet potato fries. Actually, I should’ve ordered the onion rings – I found out later that you can order onion rings with your sandwiches instead of fries or slaw. Anyway, the sandwich was good and I would order it again – but request that they leave off the slaw.

Other new offerings on the menu are the Crispy Chicken Sandwich and Turkey and Provolone Sandwich, and Big Al’s Chicken Salad. That sounded intriguing – it’s romaine and iceberg lettuce topped with smoked chicken, dried cherries, candied walnuts, pickled onions, and watermelon, of all things. Sounds like something that would be very refreshing on a warm summer day.

Veggie burgers are still available at Hungry Bear, but take a little bit longer to prepare. But a veggie burger cheeseburger is still an option!

There’s two new desserts on the menu – the Lemon Bumblebee Cupcake and Trixie’s Blueberry Pie. The cupcake has a lemon cream filling and honey-lemon frosting.

We had the blueberry pie. They actually keep them warm in a warming oven, but of course by the time we finished our sandwiches it was only barely (bearly?) warm. It was filled with lots of plump blueberries – it wasn’t just congealed blueberry goop. It was a little bit tart – Lee liked it that way, I thought it could have used a little more sugar. It was really good, though.

The new menu gets two thumbs up from us – we’ll be back, for blueberry pie if nothing else. 🙂 The restaurant’s seating area down at the edge of the Rivers of America makes it one of the nicer places to eat at Disneyland – it seems just a little quieter and more out of the way than a lot of the other restaurants.

You can view the menu HERE.