Breakfast Review
If you stroll down Main Street USA at the Magic Kingdom a little ways around the corner you will find a landmark restaurant called Crystal Palace. This restaurant has been serving Disney guests since the park’s opening. Pooh and friends appear at this restaurant for all 3 meals.
We are major big fans of Crystal Palace’s lunch buffet. It has many delicious choices to choose from…even better, you won’t find a lot of these unique eats at other buffets. There are lots of original salads and dishes here or just the regular “run of the mill” buffet food.
On this particular day though we had a 9:00 reservation and waited about 10 minutes which isn’t bad. Lunch is always a long wait-we’ve never waited less than 20 minutes WITH a reservation at lunch and if you don’t have a reservation for any meal here, it’s really tough to get in that day without one.
It is a large buffet area shaped like an upside down “U” with 2 small counter areas in the middle. Each side is duplicated with a lot of the same items up until you get to the middle of the upside down “U” where the chef station is.
For breakfast there is a pancake/omelette maker and during lunch and dinner there is a meat chef who cuts the meats for you.
Let’s concentrate on breakfast now. The counters in the middle is where you find the pastries, muffins, croissants, quick breads, danish, cakes, breads and other carbohydrate lover’s (like me) favorites.
The morning we were there they only had breakfast pizza (pizza crust topped with egg and cheese) and french toast fritters. I thought this was pretty weak for kid’s choices.
The fruit bar is the next section up which basically housed most of your typical buffet fare of fruit items and yogurt. Not nearly the variety of items they offer at lunch in this section, a little disappointing.
Then you make a turn to the hot breakfast bar which included items like eggs, potatoes, bacon, sausage, grits, gravy, etc…again nothing out of the ordinary.
Then in the middle was the omelette chef and on this particular day we couldn’t even get her to crack a smile. As a matter a fact she was downright miserable… I didn’t even want to ask her for an omelette. We asked for pancakes and she just dropped them on our plates as if she was doing us a huge favor. I was hoping she got off to a bad start on that particular day otherwise she doesn’t deserve to be a part of the Disney cast member organization. Did she forget she was in the happiest place on earth? Maybe we needed to send Tigger over to get her to smile, I don’t know…yeap that’s her in the photo…
All in all, the characters came by pretty quickly…Tigger, Pooh, Eeyore and Piglet. You want to make sure not to leave to go to the buffet if they are close by because they take a long time to cycle around again. The do a little parade every 15 minutes or so.
Honestly, while the food was fair to good, it could have been better or there could have been more variety or more of a uniqueness to it like their lunch items. This breakfast will set you back $25-$30 a pop if you’re not on the dining plan which I think is as overpriced as Chef Mickeys.
Although many guests do enjoy this establishment, I can think of so many of the other Disney buffets, even some that have characters that I would rather go to for breakfast (ie. 1900 Park Fare, Cape May Cafe or The Wave). There was pretty much nothing but fruit for the health conscious. So, we’ll be skipping this one from now on. But, we’ll save it for lunch.