To Be Our Guest, or Not: The Pros and Cons of Magic Kingdom’s Most Popular Restaurant

Be Our Guest is a restaurant themed after Beauty and the Beast in Disney’s Magic Kingdom in Orlando. It’s crazy popular. Ask anybody who’s tried to get dinner reservations. Is it worth the hype? Should you put their service to the test? Today’s post covers the pros and cons of this popular Disney World restaurant.

Let’s start with the cons so we can finish with a happy ending. Fair enough?

CONS

(1) Price

Maybe it’s not fair to list price as a negative for Be Our Guest, because it could just as well be a negative for a lot of different aspects of Disney World. Nevertheless, I mention it here because it’s worth noting before checking Disney’s web page (or app!) for a dining reservation. It also gives me the opportunity to explain how the restaurant recently became more expensive.

Be Our Guest is a quick-service restaurant for breakfast and lunch and a table-service restaurant for dinner. Breakfast runs about $25 an entrée and lunch selections range between $15 and $20. The relatively high price of these offerings make any of them a good choice for using meal credits if you’re on a Disney Dining plan.

Dinner at Be Our Guest changed on July 27 this year. The restaurant now offers a new prix fixe dinner menu. Guests choose an appetizer, entrée and dessert for one price. The new dinner costs $55 per adult and $35 per child. If you’re on a meal plan, dinner now costs two credits per meal, instead of one. This is similar to how Disney handles Cinderella’s Royal Table.

Disney describes the new dinner menu as “enhanced” and it is indeed fancier than the restaurant’s previous offerings. Octopus, escargot and black-eyed pea tortellini dishes highlight the overhauled menu and suggest a more upscale experience. Whether or not it’s upscale enough to justify $200 for a family of four depends on your personal point of view.

(2) Seating

Be Our Guest is a large restaurant with three main dining rooms. Most of the seating is in the Grand Ballroom. A second dining room is designed after the West Wing and a third, called the Rose Room, is unique to Be Our Guest and does not appear in the movie. Despite the large space and multiple rooms, Disney pushes the limit on guest capacity by placing the tables extremely close to each other. Uncomfortably close in my opinion, particularly if you’re seated in the rows of tables near the entrance of the ballroom. It felt like one long table with multiple parties, rather than individual groupings. It’s not uncommon to overhear conversations from other tables. On the plus side, the close proximity also makes it super easy to glance at your neighbors’ plates and confirm your menu selection. (casually of course!)

You could argue Disney placed the tables in this configuration in order to meet the high demand. ‘Ohana and Le Cellier, two other high-demand restaurants at Disney World share similar table-configuration issues. I think what makes it slightly more noticeable at Be Our Guest is the restaurant’s unique theming. Guests naturally want to walk around and explore the details before or after they eat. Since there’s not a lot of space for them to do so, the close proximity of the tables is sometimes problematic (guests bumping into your table or pausing to take a photo a few inches from your plate!) Breakfast and lunch exaggerates the issue even more than dinner, because guests are responsible for finding their own seating and are therefore randomly roaming the rooms for somewhere to sit.

(3) Food

Be Our Guest offers what I describe as Americanized-French cuisine. For lunch you’ll find croissants, croque monsier, quiche, ratatouille and French Onion soup on the menu along with some traditional American fare. Dinner entrees include filet mignon, lamp chomps and pork tenderloin. I’m not really a foodie, so forgive my plain language here. You can read full reviews on the Disney Dining blog and other sources. In my opinion, the food is pretty good, but not magnificent (magnificique?). It’s really more about the cool atmosphere.

I tend to enjoy the food at lunch slightly better than breakfast or dinner, but that’s a personal preference. Admittingly, I may be biased by the awesome cupcakes at lunch, since they are some of my favorite treats at Disney World  (chocolate, strawberry, lemon, oh my!).

As mentioned previously, Disney reworked the dinner menu in July of this year. If you haven’t checked the menu for a while, it’s worth another glance before booking. The new selections may make the restaurant even less appealing to finicky eaters in your travel party.

I’ve encountered multiple friends and acquaintances that were determined to eat at Be Our Guest, even though they admittedly weren’t excited about the menu.  One such acquaintance told me he selected the restaurant for his daughter’s fifth birthday, even though he knew she probably wouldn’t like anything on the menu. My response (in my head) was “Really?!” I understand wanting to see the inside of the castle, but is it truly what his daughter would prefer? Could you get the same ecstatic kid response you’re looking for by taking her to Tales with Belle or a meal at Epcot’s Akershsus instead? At least she’d get to meet Belle in person at these other venues. Sadly Be Our Guest does not offer this opportunity.

(4) Reservations

Another notable negative about Be Our Guest is the difficulty in securing reservations, particularly for dinner. It’s a hard task, even at the 180-day mark when the dining reservation window first opens. Disney lets you start booking reservations for your entire visit on the 180th day before the first day of your trip. I’ve never been able to make a reservation for Be Our Guest on the first day of our trip this way, but I have had luck with dates later in our visit. I’ve also been successful finding tables around the 30 day mark, by constantly checking (stalking?!) the Disney reservation system. You can always try checking in person on the day of your visit for cancellations too.

The comments above are referring to dinner reservations specifically. There’s a slight chance that dinner reservations will get easier to book once the new menu and higher fixed prices are in place this summer. The new menu could deter some guests. Others may opt for Cinderella’s Royal Table instead because the price advantages of Be Our Guest will no longer be in play. Time will tell. The restaurant opened in 2012 and hasn’t shown signs of slowing down yet.

Breakfast and lunch reservations can be challenging too, but not to the same extent. Breakfast in particular has become slightly easier since Disney changed its park opening policies last year. Some guests used to reserve an early breakfast to gain admittance to Magic Kingdom before the rest of the crowds. Since the opening show was moved from the main gate to the steps of the castle, now all guests can enter the park before the official opening time.  So you don’t get the full benefit of fewer crowds with a breakfast reservation, but you also get a better chance of snagging a reservation.

Pros

Now that I’ve covered the negatives regarding Be Our Guest, let’s get on with the positives. Why do so many people want to eat here anyway?

(1) Theming

Clearly the best part of Be Our Guest and the reason people are often willing to put up with cons 1 through 4 above is the awesome theming. It really is like entering Beast’s castle from the animated movie. The massive front doors, shiny suits of armor and foreboding gargoyle columns help transport you to another world as soon as you enter the space. The Grand Ballroom truly is grand, with glowing chandeliers, high gloss floors and cherub paintings on the ceiling. The infamous West Wing and Belle’s library, where guests order quick-service meals during the day or meet the Beast in the evenings, are both exquisitely themed. It really is one of the best-themed areas throughout Disney World, and that’s no small accomplishment.

(2) The Beast

Another benefit of dining at Be Our Guest is the opportunity to meet the Beast. Although he appears in the Festival of Fantasy parade and the end of the Fantasmic performance at Hollywood Studios, Be Our Guest is the only place where you can meet the Beast one-on-one. During dinner, he’s dramatically introduced to guests as the host of the evening’s activities in the Grand Ballroom. Then he crosses through the room, enters the library and waits for post-dinner meetings. It’s a fun time and a great chance for photographs, but it’s only available during dinner. The Beast does not make appearances at breakfast or lunch.

(3) Quick-Service Reservations

Another thing I like about Be Our Guest is the ability to make reservations for quick-service meals. This is unique from other quick-service restaurants, where you jump in line and hope for the best! It may be a hassle to make reservations, but it’s nice once you’re in the park to know there’s a table waiting for you. Even more so if Magic Kingdom happens to be crowded, raining or both!

The fact that Disney offers quick-service at Be Our Guest at all is a bonus. No other restaurant on property offers both options in this way. I like that you can still soak up the beautiful theming of this restaurant for a lower price and less valuable park time than you can for dinner. There’s a chance this could disappear in the future, but so far the planned updates in July have excluded any changes to breakfast and lunch.

(4) Magical extras

Be Our Guest is also full of magical extras. Some are straight out of the film, such as the enchanted rose under its glass cover and the changing prince-to-beast wall painting in the West Wing. The perpetual snowfall seen through the “windows” of the Grand Ballroom and the frosted glass on the doors add a nice touch. If you’re dining for breakfast or lunch, you can enjoy choosing your own table and watching the Disney servers magically find you. At dinner, sometimes your host will guide you to your table with a glowing Lumiere. It is an enchanted castle after all. Disney does a great job with unexpected extras to fit the theme.

So that’s it. Four cons and four pros about Disney’s Be Our Guest. There’s a lot to consider and choosing to dine at Be Our Guest really depends on the interests of your travel party.

Perhaps in summary we could think of it this way. If you love Beauty and the Beast, are willing to put in the time to get a reservation and don’t mind paying extra for the experience then go for it! I hope you have a great experience. If, however, your Disney loyalties lie elsewhere and you don’t want to or are unable to make a reservation for Be Our Guest than don’t sweat it. It won’t make or break your trip. You can get a Beauty and the Beast-fix at multiple other places throughout the parks (Live Show at Hollywood Studios, Tales with Belle at Magic Kingdom, etc.). “Be Our Guest” is kind of the theme of the whole park, not just the one restaurant anyway.

Maybe just grab a Mickey pretzel and hum the enchanted theme song to yourself?

Add a little magic to your world!