Which character meals do I keep?

[disny_luvr]

We just ate dinner at Chef Mickey's last week and thought it was great! I know CM gets a lot of negative reviews on here, but we eat there every trip and enjoy it. Maybe it helps that we usually book a 5:00 ADR; the restaurant is clean and food well stocked.

I just want to add that we ate breakfast at Garden Grill last week and we thought it was excellent! It was probably our favorite meal of our trip. You may want to consider that one. Also, Chip and Dale are there, and it was the only time we saw them and they are my boys favorite.

 

[Jenny Sanders]

We did 5 character meals on our trip this year... and 6 the year before. My kids love the character meals so I figure we might as well do them while they are still young and really enjoy the characters.

But, if you are dropping two- I'd say Akershus (since you are doing CRT) and Chef Mickey. If you haven't been to Tusker House before, I'd keep it. It's one of our favorites- we always have breakfast or brunch there.

My kids are now 24, 20 and 16 and they still LOVE the character meals...I think they bring out the "kids" in them. We actually have 2 booked this weekend (1900 Park Fare and Ohana for breakfast).

 

[Baklava]

I'm doing 6 character meals in a 7 day trip and hoping it is not too much, but my kiddo loves the character meals and requested them. I don't go very often (our last trip was 2 years prior and trip before that was 4 years prior) so I figured I'd go all out while he is still young enough to enjoy (8)

We are doing mostly breakfasts, not PPO (we are skewing toward later nights)
Tusker House
Cape May
Ohana
H&V Minnie's Seasonal Dine with F!
Garden Grill
Crystal Palace

my son won't touch a princess breakfast with a 10 foot pole

We did 10 days and we "only" did 8- although we hit 9 different ones because we split up when DD and I did CRT and DH and DS (18) went to Crystal Palace to see Pooh Bear and his buffet. I thought we'd done more but I think I lumped the 2 dinner shows (Hoop Dee Doo and Spirit of Aloha) into the same category.

Cape May for breakfast was truly wonderful, as was Garden Grill.

 

[SGMCO]

Ohana, Tusker House are both very good when it comes to characters and food.

 

[ChasingLeslie]

IMO, you don't need CRT and Akershus. Choose CRT if you are dying to eat in the castle, or choose Akershus for a cheaper alternative. You also don't need Chef Mickey and H&V Holiday Dine: they are the same characters.

You may also want to switch Tusker for Crystal Palace for character variety.

 

[celina14]

Each year we add more and more character ADRs. This year we're up to 7, lord help us.

This has a list of all character dining spots and which characters are at each place.

http://wdwprepschool.com/guide-to-all-disney-world-character-meals/

Not to make your life more difficult, but H&V Disney Jr breakfast/lunch is near the top of our list of best ADRs for kids. Can't beat Sofia the First, Doc McStuffins, Handy Manny and Jake at that age.

This is just what I needed, thank you!

 

[Dec38]

If Frozen Ever After is important to you, and you want to hedge in case you're not able to get a fast pass at a time you want, or want to use your fast pass for something else, I would not cancel Akershus. I believe Josh noted in his recent blog post that the PPO breakfast does give an advantage to getting to FEA at rope drop. And in any event, I would much prefer sitting in Air conditioning eating breakfast to waiting with hordes of people in the hot sun and trying to race to FEA with two little ones. Especially since you have free dining.

Of the ones on your list, I would cancel Chef Mickeys and keep the others.

 

[jltdone]

We did a character breakfast everyday, our son turned 5 and we all wanted to see characters.
The afternoon we got there T-REX AWESOME.
1st AM. Crystal Palace ( before park opening) was our favorite.
dinner that night was CRT.
2nd AM Chef Mickey Loved It since all the gang was there. The food was hot and fresh and got to see the gang which son loved when mickey sat at our table for a few minutes
dinner that night was brown derby with Fantasmic package.
3rd AM 1900 Park fare which was good as well.
dinner Ohana I loved it but the rest of the family didn't.
4th AM tusker house It was ok.
Dinner was B.O.G. this for me was the 2nd least favorite meal.
5th AM Cape May it was good ( since we were staying at Beach Club)
Dinner Tappen Edo AWESOME dinner.
6th CRT for breakfast WORST MEAL. The only plus to this was we had first ADR and we got some great pics down an EMPTY main street again. The food was so not worth it at ALL. We all left hungry.
Dinner last day was French at Epcot. GREAT meal.
Everyday we had a character dining experience since we all wanted to see them. It was great didn't have to wait in a lot of lines for meet and greets and got to eat as well.
We had the Deluxe Dining.
Hope this helps with all the character dining, I loved it if we did Disney again we would do the breakfast buffet with characters every single day again.

 

[celina14]

If Frozen Ever After is important to you, and you want to hedge in case you're not able to get a fast pass at a time you want, or want to use your fast pass for something else, I would not cancel Akershus. I believe Josh noted in his recent blog post that the PPO breakfast does give an advantage to getting to FEA at rope drop. And in any event, I would much prefer sitting in Air conditioning eating breakfast to waiting with hordes of people in the hot sun and trying to race to FEA with two little ones. Especially since you have free dining.

Of the ones on your list, I would cancel Chef Mickeys and keep the others.

Thanks for the tip! FEA is an absolute must for us, my daughter loves Frozen. I really hope to get a FP but I'm definitely going to hold on to the Akershus ADR until I can make my Fast Passes. I was understanding that it was only an advantage if you can get out of the restaurant by like 8:45. I'll definitely do that if we can't get a Fast Pass but I know if we go there and my daughter has to miss some of the princesses she may be upset (although we will have had CRT just the day before so maybe she'd be ok if they're the same ones). You're so right about not wanting to wait in the hoards of people with little kids. We won't be doing rope drop for it if we cancel Akershus, we'll just use the FP+.

I think I will end up cancelling Chef Mickey's since we have already done it in the past anyway and we will see all of those characters between Ohana and H&V.

 

[celina14]

We did a character breakfast everyday, our son turned 5 and we all wanted to see characters.
The afternoon we got there T-REX AWESOME.
1st AM. Crystal Palace ( before park opening) was our favorite.
dinner that night was CRT.
2nd AM Chef Mickey Loved It since all the gang was there. The food was hot and fresh and got to see the gang which son loved when mickey sat at our table for a few minutes
dinner that night was brown derby with Fantasmic package.
3rd AM 1900 Park fare which was good as well.
dinner Ohana I loved it but the rest of the family didn't.
4th AM tusker house It was ok.
Dinner was B.O.G. this for me was the 2nd least favorite meal.
5th AM Cape May it was good ( since we were staying at Beach Club)
Dinner Tappen Edo AWESOME dinner.
6th CRT for breakfast WORST MEAL. The only plus to this was we had first ADR and we got some great pics down an EMPTY main street again. The food was so not worth it at ALL. We all left hungry.
Dinner last day was French at Epcot. GREAT meal.
Everyday we had a character dining experience since we all wanted to see them. It was great didn't have to wait in a lot of lines for meet and greets and got to eat as well.
We had the Deluxe Dining.
Hope this helps with all the character dining, I loved it if we did Disney again we would do the breakfast buffet with characters every single day again.

Sounds like you had some great experiences, that's good to hear! We aren't the sit down to breakfast every day type of people so it would be too much for us to do breakfast every day. We'd rather have a sit down dinner. I am going to keep the Ohana breakfast one and possibly Akershus though but that's plenty of sit down breakfasts for us. Breakfast is my least favorite meal and my kids are happy with gogurts or cereal bars. But I definitely will keep a couple of the dinner ones also, mainly CRT and H&V and potentially TH.

 

[jltdone]

Sounds like you had some great experiences, that's good to hear! We aren't the sit down to breakfast every day type of people so it would be too much for us to do breakfast every day. We'd rather have a sit down dinner. I am going to keep the Ohana breakfast one and possibly Akershus though but that's plenty of sit down breakfasts for us. Breakfast is my least favorite meal and my kids are happy with gogurts or cereal bars. But I definitely will keep a couple of the dinner ones also, mainly CRT and H&V and potentially TH.

crt dinner was very good that was one of our best dinners, I forgot to put since it was our sons birthday on that day we had a cake made by Disney and had them delivery it to CRT for after dinner, The princess loved him, it was pretty magical to eat in the castle.

 

[celina14]

crt dinner was very good that was one of our best dinners, I forgot to put since it was our sons birthday on that day we had a cake made by Disney and had them delivery it to CRT for after dinner, The princess loved him, it was pretty magical to eat in the castle.

So glad to hear that it was a good experience for dinner there. We will also be doing either lunch or dinner there for my daughter's 5th bday so I really want it to be special for her. Can I ask how did you go about getting the cake delivered and what was the rough cost of it? I was thinking about doing that as well since it will be on her bday that we are there.

 

[jltdone]

So glad to hear that it was a good experience for dinner there. We will also be doing either lunch or dinner there for my daughter's 5th bday so I really want it to be special for her. Can I ask how did you go about getting the cake delivered and what was the rough cost of it? I was thinking about doing that as well since it will be on her bday that we are there.

There is a whole thread on DISboards about cake ordering. I am not sure where it is on here I am sure someone else can help with that. It is not hard to do it though. The cake we got was roughly $150 with delivery. I basically had to draw up a cake with details and email it off, a chef from G.F. emailed me back and said no problem they can do it but it had to be this size which was bigger than we wanted but ok. You tell them where u wanted it delivered to and what time dinner is, When we checked in I made sure the cake was there and out it comes after dinner. I didn't see it until then. if you want inbox me ur email address and then I can send out a few pics of his cake. I cant send them here cause the pic file is too big it says.