Disney’s themed Table Service restaurants are universally amazing. Each one has a distinct vibe, an ambience that envelops you in its loving glow. All of them have the intention of bringing joy into your heart, but some are more successful than others. Here are the seven Walt Disney World restaurants that are the most fun.
7. Beaches & Cream
Image: Disney50’s Prime Time Café receives most of the headlines, but I prefer a different eatery set in the same era. Beaches & Cream is the tiny restaurant residing right beside Stormalong Bay, the beloved mini-water park at Disney’s Beach Club Resort.
Due to its tiny size, the restaurant is one of the toughest reservations on the Disney campus. When you walk in the place, however, you’ll appreciate why it’s always booked. It’s a 1950s malt shop straight out of Happy Days. Here, you order burgers and fries for your meal, and then you top it off with a decadent ice cream dessert.
While you’re there, you enjoy jukebox music and a convivial atmosphere. And you’ll also hear everyone go nuts if/when someone orders the house specialty, the Kitchen Sink. It’s an ice cream treat with about 75,000 calories worth of sugar that’s meant to be shared by an entire table. The entire restaurant goes nuts when this happens, and it’s sooo much fun. Plus, you don’t have to mind your manners at Beaches & Cream, unlike those pushy fake relatives at 50’s Prime Time Café!
6. San Angel Inn Restaurante
Image: DisneyI jokingly refer to this place as “dinner at that Mel Gibson movie”, a reference to Apocalypto, a movie you’ve probably forgotten. The setting of this film was an Aztec step pyramid during an eclipse, and the same is true at San Angel Inn. Here, you dine in front of a Mesoamerican pyramid, and you feel like you’re in the middle of an eclipse due to the dark lighting in the area.
You also eat inside the Mexico Pavilion, right beside Gran Fiesta Tour Starring The Three Caballeros. As such, this eatery has the same hidden advantage of Pinocchio’s Village Haus. Boats from the attraction go by. While you eat, you get to watch people as they enjoy the rides. The setting of the restaurant is unforgettable, the darkness adds an intimacy to the festivities, and you can live vicariously through the people on the ride while you dine. It’s an intoxicating combination.
5. Hollywood & Vine: Minnie’s Seasonal Dine
Image: DisneyHollywood & Vine was once a thoroughly mediocre all-you-care-to-enjoy with little else of note. A while ago, Disney fundamentally altered the perception of the place by changing the character meal. Today, Minnie Mouse is in charge of the place, and she’s not a fan of status quo. Every three months, she changes the look of the place, celebrating each new season. The end result for diners is that the character meet-and-greet opportunities are phenomenal.
In winter, you’ll find Goofy in a Santa Claus outfit with Daisy Duck dressed as a Christmas tree. In summer, Minnie throws a beach party with Donald doing his finest Baywatch impersonation as the lifeguard on duty. In the spring, everyone wears their Sunday best. And in the fall, the best season at Hollywood & Vine, all the characters dress up in their Halloween outfits. It’s amazing. No matter when you visit this restaurant, you’ll have a ton of wonderful photo ops with Disney’s most beloved characters. The food’s still not great, but who cares? Donald Duck wears an astronaut suit!!!
4. Whispering Canyon
Image: DisneyI have a love/hate relationship with Whispering Canyon. The food is amazing, and the setting is breathtaking. It resides to the side of the lobby of Disney’s Wilderness Lodge. While you wait to be seated, you gaze up at the majesty of one of Disney’s greatest architectural triumphs, the wooden interior of the building.
Once you begin your meal at Whispering Canyon, you’re all-in. That’s good and bad in that the dining experience is unforgettable. It’s also unholy loud. Like, you may not be able to hear the person sitting right beside you at times. That’s also good and bad, presuming that you like talking to the person right beside you. On the one hand, it’s annoying, but the explanation for why is that everyone else is having such an amazing time that the entire place is raucous. In other words, it’s the breathing definition of fun. And that goes triple when you order ketchup.
3. Sci-Fi Dine-In
Image: DisneyAny of the top four restaurants is a valid choice for the most fun one at Walt Disney World. Out of everything listed here, Sci-Fi Dine-In is actually my favorite, but I also understand that it’s not for everyone. For classic movie lovers like me who grew up in the three-channel television era, cheap sci-fi movies were a basic part of television viewing. In a post-Netflix world, that’s difficult to understand, though.
The appeal of this place certainly isn’t for everyone. If you’re like me and love cheesy science fiction films about 50-feet tall men and women terrorizing the locals or outer space vixens seducing noble but virile astromen, this place is heaven on Earth. Disney’s run the same film loop of drive-in movie entertainment since the restaurant’s inception, and it still works perfectly today. My favorite is the competent secretary who saves Earth from a Martian invasion while her boss sits perfectly still and blithely smokes a pipe. It’s perfect fun, as is sitting in a fake car while ordering a meal.
2. Chef Mickey’s
Image: DisneyI’ve previously described Chef Mickey’s as pure joy, and my opinion hasn’t changed. It’s a place where children get to meet their favorite Disney characters AND they get to watch the monorail go by, too. For these reasons, it seems like a magical place where anything is possible.
While the food at Chef Mickey’s is no better than Hollywood & Vine, save for the dessert, nobody cares due to the organizational structure in place. A cast member in regular clothing directs traffic, which is to say that this person has one of the most important jobs at Disney. They keep the flow of costumed cast members heading in an orderly fashion to each table. When done right, one of Disney’s most iconic characters shows up and puts on a brief performance every five minutes or so.
While other character meetings at Disney such as the one mentioned directly above are all great, there’s something about Chef Mickey’s. It’s simply more magical for some intangible reason. The restaurant feels more Disney than anywhere else, possibly because it’s hosted in the first official Disney theme park resort in the world. Everyone feeds off the energy of the other happy patrons, and it creates the opposite of a vicious circle, a virtuous one. People at Chef Mickey’s are always laughing because the restaurant is the incarnation of fun.
1. 1900 Park Fare
Image: DisneyThe character meetings at 1900 Park Fare always leave me feeling like I’m one step behind. Two visits ago, one of the wicked stepsisters asked us to name five things that we hated about Cinderella. It was such a ridiculous, hysterical question, but we were wholly unprepared to answer.
Prior to our most recent visit, we created a list in case the person asked again. A different cast member in the same role noticed the note and started to read it. She…didn’t laugh. She was openly horrified by the fact that we were talking smack about Cinderella. Even though she was in character as a mortal enemy of her stepsister, she was clearly a Disney fan who recoiled at the notion of someone badmouthing an iconic Disney Princess. The whole experience was embarrassing and ridiculous and oh so entertaining.
That’s the joy of 1900 Park Fare. At this character meet-and-greet meal, you interact with noble Prince Charming and courageous Cinderella. You also encounter the proverbial evil Stepmother and her Kardashian-esque stepdaughters, shallow and stupid to the core.
The incongruity is engaging, and the thrill of each meal here is that it’ll be a different encounter. Each question and response leads to a different discussion and some truly inimitable moments. My favorite example was when a small boy asked for Drizella’s autograph. He panicked when he realized that he didn’t know where said autograph book was.
As the child frantically searched, Drizella improvised by exclaiming in the shrillest voice imaginable, “I’m waiting! I’m waiting!” This made him panic even more, and so she kept doing it, eventually reaching a crescendo with her voice that I expected to shatter all glassware in the surrounding area. The kid’s look of triumph when he presented the autograph book made the whole thing that much better. It was readily apparent that the cast member adored him, but she never broke character, not even for a second.
Moments like that exemplify why 1900 Park Fare is always a joyous dining experience and the most fun meal at Walt Disney World.
