My latest review is of one of the newest restaurants to open at Disney Springs, the part of Walt Disney World devoted to shopping and dining, where you don’t have to pay a hefty admission fee or even pay for parking. We end up out there a couple times a year, often to meet visiting friends, but this trip was just a daytime date with Dr. Professor Ma’am, my beautiful and brilliant better half.
I had told her about the mid-December opening of Summer House on the Lake (https://www.summerhouserestaurants.com/disney-springs/), part of a restaurant chain that boasts “California-style cuisine and breezy beach vibes.” It also sounds like the title of a horror movie, if you ask me — at one point I referred to it as Last House on the Left. My wife’s graduate school was based in Santa Barbara, and she relished her occasional trips out there, just as I’m slowly falling in love with Los Angeles, after two visits to my new employer out there. She loves the emphasis on fresh ingredients and lighter dishes in Southern California dining, so it sounded like a restaurant made just for her. It is owned by a corporate restaurant group called “Lettuce Entertain You,” so even though I was skeptical, I always appreciate a pun.
I believe we arrived for lunch on the third day Summer House on the Lake was open. It was a huge space (I believe in the old Bongo’s location, and yes, right on a manmade lake at Disney Springs), and the dining room was full of light wood and natural light. It looked like any number of hotel lobby restaurants to me, but I can definitely see the California influence, sure!
The menu features small plates, sandwiches, tacos, and salads, as well as pastas, pizzas, and a burger, but it didn’t strike me as the kind of place to order pasta, pizza, or burgers. It also highlights an in-house bakery with plenty of cookies to choose from, lots of cocktails, and a “signature Rosé Cart.” This confirmed my suspicion that Summer House on the Lake is the kind of restaurant my beloved Uncle Jerry once referred to as a “chick place,” meaning the kind of restaurant women are the most likely to love. (He was referring to the chain restaurant Mimi’s Cafe at the time. If you know, you know.) Seated at our booth, I improvised a bit of comedy about a bunch of bros wanting to hit up Summer House on the Lake to watch the game, pound some beers, demolish some nachos and wings, and hit on moms who are “being so bad” by quaffing rosé and nibbling cookies, and my wife continued to put up with me.
Anyway, we started with ahi tuna and watermelon tostadas, which came with Hass avocado and Thai chili on crisp corn tortillas. We got a plate of five, and while they were beautiful and delicious, with the slightest bit of heat, I did not detect any watermelon anywhere. 
I am a sucker for raw tuna in sushi and poke, and they were pretty generous with the tuna on these tiny tostadas. i could have eaten about twenty of these myself, easily and happily. They were my favorite thing we had at Summer House on the Lake, and I would definitely recommend them to fellow raw fish fans. 
For her main course, my wife ordered a Costa Mesa salad, with queso fresco, corn, pico de gallo, avocado, quinoa, and crispy tortilla strips. She asked for dressing on the side, and while they brought her chipotle crema in a little ramekin, we were confused if the other ramekin of dressing was the lime vinaigrette from her salad or the herb vinaigrette that was supposed to come with my salad. (More on this in a bit.)
She opted to add seared ahi tuna to her salad as a protein, I guess to stick with the tuna theme of our lunch. You can see they served her a beautifully seared slab of ahi, with a gorgeous pinkish-purple center. Other protein options, all available for an upcharge, are grilled or crispy chicken, salmon (unfortunately cooked, rather than sushi-grade raw), and steak.
I figured that as long as I was at a “chick place,” I might as well get a salad too, which is a rarity for me at a restaurant. I do make and eat salads quite often at home, believe it or not! But after chuckling at the house salad called “a nice house salad” on the menu, I chose the Buena Vista Cobb salad for myself, with avocado, egg, corn, cucumber, tomato, bacon, blue cheese, and herb vinaigrette (that might have been in that ramekin on the side, or might have been completely absent). I always forget that Cobb salads are full of delicious things I like. I would make them at home, except I never have bacon or blue cheese on hand. 
This was actually quite good, and the eggs were a lovely soft-boiled consistency I have tried to duplicate at home over the past two weeks. I think boiling for eight minutes produces creamy, glistening yolks like this.
After we were so good with our salads, it was time to be so bad with dessert. My wife ordered this seven-layer chocolate cake with vanilla chantilly cream. I wasn’t terribly interested in it, so I didn’t even try a bit. She said it was just okay.
After we paid our check and left, we discovered the cookie bar in the front of the restaurant, with huge cookies on display behind a glass counter. If you have tried the cookies from Gideon’s Bakehouse in Orlando’s East End Market or at Disney Springs, these are along the same lines — huge, decadent, chewy (a little under-baked, which I prefer to over-baked), and ridiculously rich. We got three cookies to go, which we enjoyed at home later. According to her, they were better than the chocolate cake, but so rich and heavy that they were almost too much.
My wife chose a chocolate chip cookie topped with chunks of their brown butter crispy rice treat, which are essentially posh Rice Krispies treats. They also sell the treats separately, but didn’t have any when we were there. It was good, because how could this not be good? 
She also chose this fudge bomb cookie, a moist and chewy sugar cookie topped with thick, rich, fudgy frosting. I ended up eating most of this later, because she didn’t like it as much as she expected to. It reminded me a bit of a classic New York black and white cookie, only the cookie was more buttery and less “cakey,” without that slight lemony flavor, and the frosting was softer and lacking that glossy shine. If we return, we would try different cookies next time. 
But on a rare occasion when I chose a dessert for myself, the lemon cookie did not disappoint. My wife lacks my obsession with citrusy desserts, but this had a nice, bright flavor and a slightly tart tang to balance the buttery richness and the sticky sweetness of the glaze. Like the other cookies, it came close to being too much, but I liked it much more than the other two. It tasted like a perfect summery confection, perfect for a summer house on a lake. 
But at the end of the day, I would sooner choose cookies from Heartsong Cookies, baked by the delightful Kathy Paiva, than any of these.
I also don’t know when and if we will return to Summer House on the Lake. Over my 19 years in Orlando, I’ve eaten at most of the restaurants at Disney Springs and certainly had good meals, but nothing ever bowls me over, knocks me out, leaves me raving and craving more there. I’m glad we tried a new restaurant, and I absolutely recommend Summer House at the Lake, especially to my female readers in search of a “chick place.” That said, whenever my wife and I end up at Disney Springs again for a concert at the House of Blues or meeting out-of-town friends, we would probably try something new next time.
The Saboscrivner 