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Part of our vacation package was the Disney Dining Plan. In addition to one counter service meal and one snack cart item per day, the plan includes one full service (otherwise known as table service) meal per day. These meals each include a beverage, appetizer, entree and dessert per person. Talk about a lot of food!
Disney strongly recommends advanced dining reservations for most of their table service restaurants, and the earlier you make them, the better. The earliest you can make reservations is six months in advance, and some of those restaurants will fill up within minutes of that six-month mark (like the one where we had lunch on Thursday... we had wanted to go there for dinner, but lunch was all we could get). Some people couldn't believe we made our dining reservations as early as we did, or that we could decide what we wanted to eat that far in advance, but the truth is we had no choice. It was either that or waste hours of our day every day waiting for a table to open up.
Our first reservation was lunch at the '50s Prime Time Cafe, inside Disney MGM Studios, on Monday. Part of the experience here is that the wait staff act like mothers (or aunts or uncles) from the 1950s. When they called us for our table, it was, "Porter kids, come on, time to eat!" Then if you take too long, "Hurry up, it's getting cold!" They scold you for your table manners, and tease you if you're messy. After our waitress took our order, she asked us where we were from, and then responded, "Don't they have the word 'please' in Rhode Island?" When Chris spilled his dessert, she piled napkin after napkin on the table. We asked her to take our picture, and she insisted that what we really wanted was a picture of her, and took a self-portrait before taking one of us. Those along with all the other photos we took at the restaurants are in the gallery.
For appetizers at '50s Prime Time, I had the chicken noodle soup and Chris had beer-battered onion rings. We both had the fried chicken for lunch, which came with some phenomenal mashed potatoes. And for dessert, it was apple cobbler for me and a hot fudge sundae for Chris.
Tuesday night while at Magic Kingdom, we had dinner at Tony's Town Square. This is modeled after the Italian restaurant from Lady & The Tramp where they shared spaghetti and meatballs on the rooftop. There's a beautiful Lady & The Tramp fountain inside the restaurant, which was right next to our table. After appetizers of calamari and garlic breadsticks, I had the infamous spaghetti, and Chris tried the chicken fiorentina (probably the only table service entree the entire week that he was less than impressed with). Dessert at Tony's is a sampler of three Italian treats, served family style. I wish I could remember what they were, but I do remember that they were all delicious.
Joy and John bought us lunch Wednesday at the Rose & Crown Pub in the England section of Epcot. In all of the restaurants at Epcot, the employees are all actually from the country they represent. Our waitress had such a strong English accent it was hard to understand her! I'd never had much experience with English food before, but what we had was pretty good. Chris had the shepherd's pie (a far cry from the hamburger and instant potatoes version I'd been accustomed to as a kid) and I enjoyed the soup and sandwich combination, which consisted of a roast beef sandwich with horseradish mayo, and potato and leek soup.
That night we had a dinner reservation at 'Ohana at the Polynesian Resort. We got to spend a few minutes at the bar before our table was ready, where I ordered a Lapu Lapu, a rather strong mixed drink served in a fresh pineapple. Dinner was absolutely amazing. It is a huge all-you-can-eat Hawaiian feast served family style. There were fried wontons with three yummy dipping sauces, sweet & sour shrimp (which I could only stare at due to my shellfish allergy  ) and honey-coriander chicken wings to start off with. Then steak, barbecued pork loin, mesquite grilled turkey and pineapple-teriyaki glazed pork sausage accompanied by the most delicious scalloped potatoes I've ever tasted. And finally, bread pudding with bananas foster sauce for dessert. The whole thing is very family-oriented, so throughout dinner there is an entertainer who walks around singing and playing her ukulele, and engaging the kids in various activities, including a coconut race where they push coconuts around on the floor with brooms. It can be a chaotic atmosphere, but it was so much fun to watch all those kids having such a blast, and I can imagine how much more fun it will be if we can take our own kids there someday.
Thursday we had our lunch at Le Cellier Steakhouse in Canada at Epcot (the high-demand restaurant for which we couldn't get a dinner reservation). It was easy to see why the place is so popular! For appetizers, I had the beefsteak tomato stack and Chris had the Prince Edward Island mussels. Our tastes in steak are almost identical, so we both had the filet mignon for our entree. Oh. My. God. By far the best steak I've ever had... in fact I'm afraid to eat steak anywhere else now, for fear that Le Cellier has ruined me for good. And, it comes with these cream cheese mashed potatoes, which are even better than the ones we had at '50s Prime Time. The desserts are cute and fun, and pretty tasty themselves. Chris had the chocolate "moose" (yeah, it's an actual moose), and I, the campfire s'mores.
We spent all day Friday at Sea World and Discovery Cove, so we had an extra meal credit to use on Saturday before we had to leave. We decided to have lunch at Raglan Road, which is where the Friday dinner reservation had been before we canceled anyway. It's an Irish pub located in the Pleasure Island area of Downtown Disney. Their Disney Dining Plan policy is slightly different from most of the other restaurants: instead of an appetizer per person, the entire table shares one appetizer. Which was fine with us... we'd eaten so much food that week I'm surprised we didn't pop. We chose the Dalkey duo: battered and deep-fried sausages with a mustard dipping sauce. They were deliciously unhealthy. 
For lunch I had the shepherd's pie (which Chris said was not as good as the one at the Rose & Crown) and Chris, wanting to get the most out of those dining credits, chose the most expensive thing on the menu: the sirloin steak (I know I tried a bite but can't remember how it tasted, but I'm guessing it wasn't as good as the steak at Le Cellier, either). I can't remember what my dessert was called, but it was a trio of little berry parfaits. The only one I cared much for was the blueberry. The other two were much too tart. Chris had the bread & butter pudding, which wasn't really a sweet dish, but was pretty good just the same.
We only had one bad food experience at Disney worth mentioning, not at a table service restaurant, but at the counter service food court at the Port Orleans Riverside resort where we stayed. We both had pasta dishes with chicken in them. The chicken, however, was not breast meat. It was bony, gristley, dark meat... and it was absolutely disgusting. It's a good thing we were still fairly satisfied from lunch that day, because neither one of us could finish our pasta. If you're ever at the Riverside and end up eating at the food court, at the very least, stay away from the build-your-own-pasta station.
Next installment: Shopping, Sleeping, and Getting Around at WDW!
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