We always book at 10:30. We have never had an issue with food changing over or characters. We have never seen less than 7 characters, and we have seen up to 13. One year, the restaurant was not very busy at that time when we were there, and the characters kept coming back to our table to play with DD, since they did not have other tables left to see. We like that time because we don't lose the early morning park time with shorter lines. We were just there a couple of weeks ago, and I think we saw 11 characters this time.