We had the first morning slot at the wedding pavilion for our wedding. After the cake and champagne reception at GF (it rained a little, so we actually ended up in the front of Citricos for the reception, and Sleeping Beauty showed up!), we had our guests take a couple of hours to do whatever they wanted while we went around Disney (outside the parks - on the ferry, the monorail, outside Epcot, outside MK, at the Poly, on the beach at the Poly) and had them meet us....
back at the Wilderness Lodge for the wedding luncheon at Whispering Canyon.
I can tell you that WC did an incredible job. We had some of the same issues - we wanted something everyone would enjoy, and we had several that have simpler tastes. When we looked, the only other thing we saw where we thought we could get food everyone would eat was some of the steakhouses (you have limited choices of restaurants at lunchtime). And the steakhouses were going to be a lot more expensive than we wanted to go. Plus, though we hadn't eaten there before, everything at WC sounded SO good. And it was. My nephew (about 11 at the time), just before the food came out, whispered (not so quietly!
) to his mom, "Are they going to have anything I'll eat here?" His eyes lit up when they started bringing out all that barbecue.
They had us in an area that was separate from the main dining room that was near the windows in the back of the lobby area. It was almost like having a private room - except one side is mostly open to the lobby, so we did have people walking by. But it was separated enough that it felt private. It was really nice, and they did a GREAT job of taking care of us - including getting a hot dog & fries for my DHs nephew, who was the only one not thrilled about the BBQ (but he wouldn't have been happy with much of anything other than a hot dog, chicken nuggets, or mac & cheese.)
A couple of tips, since you sound like your schedule is similar to ours, though we didn't do the dessert party.
- The first ceremony is early. We did it because we wanted to do our MK portrait session on the same day, so we wanted to minimize the time between those pictures and the wedding itself. The problem is - my family, not being great on the planning thing, and, I guess, incapable of feeding themselves without my mom around (she & my sister came to my hotel @ 4:30 in the morning to help me get ready), did not have breakfast. They (and us too - we had no time to eat) were REALLY hungry by the time lunch rolled around. If you aren't doing a lot of pics after the ceremony, that may not be an issue. We had a total of 2 1/2 hours of pics booked with our photographer. They were fantastic, but whew....
- In retrospect, we should have just gone ahead and done the cake at the "reception". Instead, we had it transferred to the WL - WC as dessert with lunch. We kind of figured no one would really want cake that early in the morning. Since no one had eaten..... yeah, they were all really disappointed when we cut it, fed each other, and then moved straight to the dances while they packed up the cake.
We should have just had the cake then - or at the very least, done a better job of making sure they all understood the schedule a little better (of course, I thought I did explain it to them well.... nope, the rest aren't planners at all....)
- It will take you longer than you think to get everyone from SBP to WL... no matter how they get there. In our case, I timed the lunch a little too close given the plan I had for getting pictures. We were about 1/2 hour late.... I thought our families were going to turn to cannibalism by the time we got there!
Given the way you are planning things - if you think you won't be taking too long between the ceremony and lunch for pictures, I'd ask about having the cake served at lunch for dessert. But you might want to think about letting everyone have the cake during the small reception immediately after the ceremony. From everything I've heard, there will be so much other stuff at the dessert party, having the cake there too would be overkill.
If you want to see pictures - I only have two up from the luncheon, and one is actually on the bridge in the WL, so you don't see the setup in WC. But go to
http://www.kims-world.net and work your way down to the wedding pictures. We do have a lot more photos than that, but that's all I've managed to put up on the site.
