Be Our Guest at Magic Kingdom: A Review

Be Our Guest is the newest restaurant in Magic Kingdom and needless to say it’s popular. Reservations aren’t quite as hard to get as Cinderella’s Royal Table, but it’s close. Demand is huge, and having finally gotten to eat there, I can see why. We actually ate here for both lunch and dinner, which is quick service and table service, respectively. So I’ll merge the experiences into this one review…

Theme & Ambiance – 10 out of 10 points

In terms of building up suspense, I think Be Our Guest does it the best. You can see the castle in the distance across a beautiful bridge in Fantasyland, but before you can enter, you’ve got to checkin first. Once you’ve done that, you head over the bridge and enter the castle where you essentially checkin again. For table service (dinner) you’ll get a pager, for quick service (breakfast, lunch) you’ll visit kiosks to place your order. Both take a decent amount of time even with reservations.

At some point you’ll either be seated (dinner) or find seating (breakfast, lunch) and let me just say its pretty breathtaking. Where Cinderella’s Royal Table feels very regal and old school, Be Our Guest feels so much different, a touch more modern and colorful.

There are three dining areas: The Grand Ballroom is the biggest and feels exactly like its name: a ballroom. The Castle Gallery is 2nd biggest and is based on Belle’s library. The West Wing is the smallest- and the darkest- which is Beast’s study. For dinner we ate in the Grand Ballroom and for lunch we ate in the Castle Gallery. Both were beautiful in their own right, but we preferred the Ballroom. Since we were there during Christmas, the panoramic windows had snow falling which we thought was awesome.

We think The West Wing would be the coolest place to eat, but alas, it is the smallest and hardest to get seated in. As a fun surprise, throughout our dinner service they would announce “our host” and Beast would come out in full costume for pictures with guests.

Menu & Food – 8.5 out of 10 points

For dinner, the menu itself had some pretty nice options and decent variety though I suspect vegetarians may not find a lot of options. Before the main courses, they brought out bread and butter which was actually really tasty. The butter had some nice touches which I am forgetting (sorry!) but it was tasty.

For the main courses, I enjoyed the steak and my fiancee enjoyed the daily fish and we both found them delicious. As good as the bread and butter, and main courses were, the dessert part was the nicest surprise. Instead of ordering off a boring menu, they wheel over a dessert tray to you and let you view what you’d be ordering. This was the hardest part of the evening as we had to narrow it down to just one item. We each picked a different cupcake and they were pretty good, but I regretted not ordering the eclair.

For lunch, the menu is significantly different with mostly soups, salads, and sandwiches. You order at kiosks, then find a seat, and the servers find you (via your Magic Band). Food came out pretty quickly but was still not as warm as I would have liked.

I took a gamble on the Croque Monsieur and it paid off- it was delicious! Leslie went for the Tuna Niçoise Salad and she loved it as well. This time around I finally got to enjoy the eclair, a regret from dinner earlier in the trip. All in all, I might have actually enjoyed the food at lunch time better, because it felt more like “comfort food”. It was delicious in both visits though, albeit of course a little pricier than other restaurants in the parks.

Extra Credit – 4 out of 5 points

These things don’t deserve their own paragraph (usually) but could still be point-worthy tidbits. Each item is worth -1 to 1 points, which means places can actually lose points here!

Service: Our server for table-service was nice but not amazing. (+ 0.5 points)
Ideal environment for: Anyone- the theme is so much fun and the food was tasty. (+ 1 points)
Dessert: Dessert carts at dinner are a nice touch, but we were not blown away by desserts. (+ 0.5 points)
Location: Smack dab in Fantasyland and, again, eating inside a castle! (+ 1 points)
Will return on future visit: Definitely for lunch, maybe for dinner, and ideally enjoy The West Wing dining area. (+1 points)

Be Our Guest Total Score:
22.5 out of 25 points

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