Welcome back to my series of posts about Disneyland food! In the first of three parts, I wrote about Eat Like Walt, a book about food at Disneyland while Walt Disney was still alive. Last week, I wrote about the quick service meals we ate on our recent trip. This week, I’ll talk about the table service meals we had this time around. How do those experiences compare to our quick service meals? The answer may surprise you!
When we go to Disneyland, we regularly dine at Napa Rose, the fine-dining restaurant in Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel. We particularly enjoy dining at the Chef’s Counter, looking out into the kitchen, but this time, we decided to just sit at a regular table. The Chef’s Counter only has two seatings per night, and we wanted more flexibility with our schedule.
Because we were celebrating my wife’s birthday with this meal, we were pretty excited about it. We were also excited because we had a room in the Grand Californian, which meant that we didn’t have to worry about getting back to our hotel after drinking the wine for which Napa Rose is famous. A number of times in the past, we had been served by a particular server, so we asked to be seated in his section. We did, which may have turned out to be a mistake, which I will talk about in a bit.
Napa Rose has their regular menu, and then they have a prix-fixe tasting menu, which they call the Vintner’s Table, which changes seasonally. (So does the regular menu, for that matter.) The Vintner’s Table looked like a pretty good selection, plus you can add wine pairings for each course, so we went with that.
(As usual, I feel like I lack the vocabulary to really talk about the food, plus it’s not like I was going to sit and take notes at my wife’s birthday dinner. So this is more of a photo album than an in-depth review of the meal.)
We started with a butternut squash panna cotta as an amuse-bouche. We also had a nice selection of breads, although not as nice as in previous visits. The sweet potato rolls, in particular, weren’t quite as soft and moist as we had expected.
Our fish course was a pan-roasted Baquetta grouper. I don’t think my wife or I had ever eaten grouper before. I don’t know how to describe it; not quite as fishy as salmon, but not as delicate as butterfish, I guess. It was served with Puntarelle, red flame grapes, Meyer lemon, and red fresco chile broth. I hesitate to call it an appetizer, because the portion was pretty big.
The wine with the fish was a Grgich Hills Chardonnay.
The first meat course was a wild boar bolognese. This came with trofie pasta (which I mistook for spaetzle), chestnuts, tomato confit, and ricotta salata.
This was paired with a nice Chianti.
The second meat course featured a grilled Angus ribeye, served with forager mushrooms, charred onions, salsify, and black truffle essence. I love steak, mushrooms, and onions, so this was right up my alley. The steak was served in two pieces: the main part of the steak, and the considerably more tender cap. The ribeye cap is one of my wife’s favorite cuts, but since it wasn’t really explained to us how the meat was being served, she was actually not able to eat the whole cap, because she was getting full. Me, because I’m a big ol’ pig, I ate the whole thing.
This course was paired with a Cabernet Sauvignon.
For dessert, we had a Minneola tangelo creme caramel. This was a nice, light, citrusy finish to the evening. It came paired with a Sauvignon Blanc.
While the food was delicious, as usual, the service and atmosphere weren’t as enjoyable as we had found on previous visits. Unfortunately, we were seated next to a very large party of about 18 or so, including a number of really young children. There was also at least one baby, who hurled at least two plates or dishes to the floor during their meal, breaking them.
So, not only was our fine dining experience affected by having a large number of children running around the table and the sound of dishes crashing to the floor, but our server’s attention was clearly much more focused on that table than on us. For example, he wasn’t able to thoroughly explain the difference in the cuts of ribeye to us when they were served, and consequently, my wife didn’t make a point of making sure she ate from each cut equally, because they were, in effect, different cuts of meat.
I get that Disneyland is a family vacation spot, and I don’t want to come off sounding anti-kid. However, if I’m paying in the neighborhood of $150 per person for a meal, I want to be able to enjoy it without a bunch of kids running around my table, and without listening to plate after plate hit the floor at the table next to me. Honestly, if you can’t take your baby to a restaurant without the china being destroyed, maybe a place like Napa Rose isn’t the best choice. But try explaining that to people who don’t want their decision to have children affect any other part of their lives, no matter how much that affects the people around them.
That’s leaving aside the fact that, increasingly, we’re seeing more and more people coming to the restaurant dressed in their T-shirts and shorts, which also affects our dining enjoyment. (One time, we saw a mother and daughter in the restaurant eating in their pajamas.) We have loved Napa Rose in the past, but if I want to have a nice experience ruined by being surrounded by low-class tourists, I can just stay at home and go to the Strip, you know?
We also had afternoon tea at Steakhouse 55, which we had previously enjoyed. I wrote about that extensively in the past. Here are the pictures from this visit.
The table was set very nicely and elegantly.
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My wife was really looking forward to our meal.
It was the middle of the day, but a glass of sparkling wine is always welcome.
I believe both the salad and the wine only come with the premium tea package.
The tower of food (scones on top, sandwiches in the middle, and dessert on the bottom) is always impressive.
The scones were served with lemon curd, clotted cream, and I literally don’t remember what kind of berry jam.
The sandwiches were okay, but the bread tasted just a little bit stale.
Dessert, on the other hand, was delicious. No complaints whatsoever.
Unfortunately, however, we were seated between two large groups of six each. This absolutely affected the quality of our service; our server never came to check on us. When we had finished our first pots of tea, we had to get his attention and flag him down to order more. As a result, we didn’t get to try as many teas as we wanted (just two each, as opposed to the at least three teas we had tried last time). He didn’t seem anywhere near as professional or knowledgeable as our server the last time we’d had afternoon tea there.
We enjoyed the food, but we left feeling much more frustrated than satisfied. Sandwiched between two large groups, it felt like a very crowded, noisy experience, and we really felt ignored by our server. We had stopped going to Steakhouse 55 for dinner some time ago, due to the increasingly casual feel, between the servers not seeming professional and the diners being loud, annoying and not wearing pants. After this experience, Steakhouse 55 may be off our list altogether for a while.
However, all was not lost! We had a really good meal at the Carthay Circle restaurant in Disney’s California Adventure, as part of the Frozen dining package.
We first dined at Carthay Circle when it first opened, and, to be honest, didn’t have a great experience. However, we really wanted to see the new Frozen stage show at DCA, and they have a package where you eat a prix-fixe lunch at Carthay Circle and get reserved seating for the Frozen show. We don’t like to wait in lines, we like to eat, and friends of mine had had really good lunch experiences at Carthay Circle in recent years, so we decided to give it a shot.
(I didn’t take a photo of the amuse, and don’t remember what it was. Sorry.)
The first course was a soup and salad pairing. The soup was parsnip soup with ham, and it was delicious. And look at the adorable little cup it came served in!
For my entree, I chose the “petit” filet. I say “petit” in quotes, because it was much bigger than expected. It came served with a blue cheese risotto, mushrooms, and grapes. I’ve never had grapes with a steak, but they tasted great. The blue cheese came in big chunks, but once I mixed it in with everything else, it was good.
My wife ordered the chicken and pasta dish. As with my risotto, she needed to mix the items on her plate together to achieve a perfect balance. Once she had, however, she really enjoyed her entree.
For dessert, we had cream-filled Olafs from Frozen. The head and face were white chocolate. We were told the arms were chocolate-covered pretzels, but I really didn’t taste any pretzels in there at all. The snow chunks were meringue. Cute AND delicious!
We also had a number of cocktails. I don’t remember what we ordered, and I didn’t take any pictures. But they were great. Trust me; even if you don’t have time for a meal at Carthay Circle, their bar is fantastic.
The meal we had at Carthay Circle was everything that our meal at Napa Rose wasn’t. Our servers were attentive and made sure we had everything we needed. The atmosphere was calm and relaxing. The food was almost as good as at Napa Rose. This was easily the most enjoyable table service restaurant meal we had on our vacation, and now I want to enjoy a regular meal there. (Our server did say that lunch is more relaxed than dinner, so maybe that’s the way to go.)
So, overall, I have to say that we enjoyed our quick-service meals much more than our table-service meals. The food was maybe not as good, and the meals were’t as leisurely, but they met our expectations in ways that the table-service meals did not. We’ll still go to places like Napa Rose (although probably with a bit of a chip on our shoulders next time) or Blue Bayou or Cafe Orleans. But the only table service restaurant I’d be excited to revisit based on this trip would be Carthay Circle. And I find myself really missing Flo’s V8 Cafe.
This week’s Funko Pop! of the Week is a Disney Parks exclusive. It’s a Pop! version of the statue of the Collector that can be seen outside of the Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission Breakout ride.
I’ll be honest: I don’t like heights, and didn’t really enjoy the old Twilight Zone Tower of Terror ride. The sudden drops and bouncing up and down like a yo-yo really played into my phobias. The last time I rode it, I was so scared that my wife told me that I should never ride it again.
However, after it was converted into the Guardians ride, I had to give it a shot. I love those characters too much to not see them on the ride. And I managed to keep my eyes open the whole time, and I didn’t cry when we got off, and I thought it was really cool, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to ride it again.
Because I was so anxious about getting on the ride, I didn’t take a photo of the actual statue. And, once we got into the queue, I was so excited about seeing all the things in the Collector’s collection, like Adam Warlock’s cocoon, I didn’t want to waste time taking photos. I just wanted to look at everything. But you can see photos of the actual statue here.
I love this Pop! It’s so detailed, and connects directly to a personal experience. We bought way too many souvenirs on this trip, but this is one I’m glad we purchased.
That’s it for this week! If you have any favorite Disney Parks table service restaurants, please let me know in the comments.
See you next week!
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