Almost time for Restaurant Reservations!

Since you can book your table service restaurant reservations 180 days in advance of your visit, we are now in the process of trying to figure out what we might have a taste for 6 months down the road. And once we figure that out, we will start making our reservations for the nights we plan to be at the parks.

As I pointed out in a previous post, we are going to spend at least two days of our seven day trip at Universal Studios, and one of those evenings will certainly be taken up by a visit to one of Emeril Lagasse's restaurants. We have dined with Emeril in Vegas and New Orleans and have never been disappointed by either the food or the service at any of his restaurants. So either Tchoup Tchoup (spelling?) or Emeril's will make the final cut there.

But at Disney itself, we are planning on dining at least once at one of the restaurants at the Animal Kingdom Lodge, and perhaps at two of them. The menu at Sanaa looks pretty good; African cuisine, but with an Indian flair. Jiko is the buffet, I believe, and we looked at it last time and wished that we had made it there.

At the parks, I hate to miss Le Cellier, so we probably won't...but I wouldn't mind giving Coral Reef another try. The last time we ate there, my wife was so ill that it cast a pall over the entire experience. We plan on doing Yak and Yeti for lunch when we go to the Animal Kingdom park, and we're thinking of trying the Brown Derby when we are at Hollywood Studios. As far as the Magic Kingdom goes, well of course we'll spend at least one day there, probably two. But I'm not overwhelmed by the dining options in that park. So we'll likely take the monorail over to the Polynesian at least once and try 'Ohana for dinner. (To this point, we have only done it for breakfast.)

The trouble with booking more than one meal at Epcot is that we were thinking that we wouldn't get park hopper options on our tickets. On our last visit we didn't use that option a single time. And on other visits we have rarely neede the option - perhaps only once or twice. It hardly seems worth adding it just so we can go to Epcot for dinner on a night that we otherwise wouldn't be visiting the park.

But then again, that's where most of the best dining at WDW seems to be for us. Besides the two I mentioned, we have always liked Chefs De France, and we wouldn't mind trying the Chinese restaurant, which is one we've never gone to. So...maybe we will be buying that park hopper option after all.

I'll post what the final dining itinerary is when we figure it all out.

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