Day 9 ('Ohana and Pinnochio Village Haus)
We kind of had a bonus day this trip and basically had it wide open. We had repeat trips to Big Thunder, Splash Mt. and the Mine Train all fastpassed for late morning/early afternoon. Last trip we had dinner at 'Ohana and liked it very much, but decided to try the breakfast this time because our daughter loves Stitch.
We had a reservation for 9:30 and arrived early due to the Magic Kingdom bus driver being nice and taking us straight to the Polynesian after dropping off the other folks at the Magic Kingdom. We were seated on time with no issues.
After being seated, we were offered some friendship bread from our new "cousins" serving us. There was bread with the pineapple as well as the frosted one that had raisins. Both were very good.
Within minutes another tray come out. This one was with fruit. All was fresh and was all you can eat, just like everything else here.
Next came the main platter. It had scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, potatoes, biscuits and Mickey/Stitch waffles. This is the only place we saw the Stitch waffles. Everything on this platter was fresh and cooked very well. It is almost identical to the Akershus offering on their main platter, but these are not the special potatoes and at Akershus there are no waffles.
Here is a rare close-up of one of the Stitch waffles... Clear photos of Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster are far more common, so enjoy! Actually most families don't sit there holding up the waffle to get a good pic, but we are far from "normal!"
As I stated before, the food here was excellent. 'Ohana is located in a beautiful setting and is a good choice for any meal.
The characters present that day were Mickey, Pluto, Lilo and Stitch. If Minnie was there also, I'll update later when I look through the pics to see for sure. It seemed like the character interaction was much closer to Tusker House than Chef Mickey's. The characters spent quite a bit of time at the tables and played around with the kids. This is a great place to meet Lilo and Stitch, and Mickey for the third time for certain. The service here was great also. We were given a version of the monkey juice that was similar to Tusker House. We never had to wait for anything. Our server was on top of all our needs.
We only had two issues here. One was minor and the other was going to be major had our meal been booked for a later time.
The first was that we were skipped by Mickey because he stopped to do a parade and another family grabbed him when he came back. Our server got him back to our table very quickly and I only mention it to help remind people to just wait their turn. We have found that 95% of negative experiences on WDW property are from people being inconsiderate. These people literally left their table and grabbed him when he returned from the parade. Again, it's not a huge deal, but it does get annoying at these meals when members from other families just allow their children to walk into pictures, grab at characters when it isn't their turn, etc.
The other issue wasn't so bad for us, but was going to be. As we were finishing our meal, waiting for Stitch and getting the bill and tip settled, a massive tour group came into the restaurant and sat together. There were at least 50 members and they took up most of the front of the restaurant. Where I felt bad for people was that they started yelling, singing and chanting louder than people do at an outside sporting event and the worst part is the adult "leaders" were leading the cheers. It was deafening. They started the chants and were still chanting 15 minutes later when we left.
I am all for having fun, and we all know the restaurants at WDW are naturally loud, but this was just over the top. It was just as distracting as if ten other families all had megaphones and stood up on the tables and just started screaming the Happy Birthday song over and over and over. There are just ways one should act in a public place and this isn't it. My purpose, like in my Akershus review, isn't to bash anyone or judge different cultures. I want to give anyone reading an accurate idea of what we experienced so that they can make an educated choice on where to eat. I refuse to overlook something like this because it did honestly impact the experience for us and would have completely ruined it had that group of teen been seated when we were. I also know this tends to be a July and January issue and will be a non-issue for most, but I have a real problem with the selfishness of those adults that led the cheering. They do these tours for a living and should know better. They just didn't care.
That's enough of that. After leaving, we went to the Magic Kingdom, then hopped a bus to the Animal Kingdom. I always tell people that you learn something new every trip that can make the next one better. The completely awesome bus driver we had from the French Quarter was kind of educating the bus on the best ways to get around and mentioned taking a bus from park to park. I always used the MK monorail to and from Epcot and we have used a boat from HWS to get to Epcot, but never used a bus to get to the AK from a park. Sure enough, there is an Animal Kingdom bus stop at the MK. We grabbed some Starbucks with a snack credit after using our fastpasses in the MK and went to the AK to close it down!