Our favorite meal for special occassions at Disney is California Grill. It was the first signature we ever tried (we did several new ones this trip), and it's still my favorite. We also like to use this meal as an excuse to dress up a little bit.
You're not going to see a lot of variety in the pictures here though, as DH and I had the exact same meal.
First we have the sourdough bread.
I really like this.
For appetizers, both of us had the triple cheese flatbread without the tomato.
I LOVE this, and it's always one of my favorite parts of the meal here.
For dinner, both of us had the oak fired fillet of beef. This is one of the few places I order steak willingly because they always cook it correctly. I constantly get lectured on how I "ruin" my steak, but I have to have it cooked all the way through. No pink for me! They butterfly it here, and I'm fine with that. Dh prefers his medium. I also ordered my sauce on the side, but I ended up really liking it.
While we were there, they were serving it with some kind of purple mashed potatoes. I admit, that bothered us a little bit, but once I convinced myself to try them, I found that they tasted pretty much like normal potatoes.
At the end of our meal was my sort of surprise. I knew DH was planning on getting me a birthday cake because I had to help him with it (he's not very Disney savvy), but he made sure I didn't know any of the details. First though, you have to have some background on this cake. My name is spelled kind of different than most people spell it, and DH had a hard time conveying this to them on the phone. Even though he spelled it out for them 3 times and they spelled it back to him correctly over the phone before he let them go, they still spelled it wrong on the banner with the cake. He was less than thrilled, but I managed to convince him that it wasn't a big deal.
The cake was yummy and moist. Dh loves the fondant and kept picking off the fondant balls........I think he ate more of them than he did actual cake. The cake was way too much for 4 people, and they boxed up the leftovers so we could take it back to our room with us.
We also got our regular desserts to take along for later. I ended up eating mine for breakfast over the next few days. I got the kid's rice krispie sushi.
Dh a strawberry dessert that isn't on the current allears menu. I think it was a cheesecake. He didn't end up eating much of his, but he did at least try it so I could review it, and he said it was pretty good.
This was a wonderful meal with great friends, and it made for an awesome birthday!