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'''Cinderella's Royal Table''' is a table-service character restaurant inside [[Cinderella Castle]] in [[Fantasyland]] at [[Magic Kingdom]] in [[Walt Disney World]]. It serves breakfast, lunch and dinner in a banquet hall on the upper floor of the castle, where guests are received by Cinderella and visited at their tables by other Disney Princesses. The restaurant opened with the park on October 1, 1971, under a different name, and took its present name on April 28, 1997.

== History ==
The dining room was part of the original Magic Kingdom. When it opened in 1971 it was called King Stefan's Banquet Hall, a name that puzzled many guests: King Stefan is the father of Princess Aurora in ''Sleeping Beauty'' (1959), not a character from ''Cinderella'' (1950). Contemporary accounts explain the choice as a search for a suitably royal name, since Cinderella's own father is unnamed in the film. For its first quarter-century the hall operated as a conventional table-service restaurant without characters.

The format changed in stages during the 1990s. A character breakfast with princesses was introduced in 1996, and on April 28, 1997, the restaurant was renamed Cinderella's Royal Table, aligning it with the castle it occupies. Character appearances were subsequently extended across the day's meals, and the restaurant became one of the most difficult reservations to obtain at Walt Disney World, a position it has retained through later changes to booking windows and pricing.

In more recent years the meal has been presented as a fixed-price menu rather than ordering from a full à la carte list, with the price including the character appearances. Like other Walt Disney World restaurants, it closed with the resort in March 2020 and reopened in stages, with princess appearances returning after an interval in which they were suspended.

== Setting ==
Guests check in at ground level and enter the Grand Hall, the castle's vaulted entrance chamber. Its walls carry a series of mosaic murals telling the story of Cinderella, designed by Imagineer Dorothea Redmond and executed by a team of craftspeople led by mosaicist Hanns-Joachim Scharff. Cinderella normally greets guests in this hall before they are shown upstairs.

The dining room itself is a high, arched chamber intended to suggest a medieval banquet hall. Stone columns, coats of arms, banners and tall stained-glass windows define the space, and the windows on one side look out over Fantasyland, including the carousel below. Seating is at closely spaced tables beneath the vaulted ceiling, and the princesses circulate between them during the meal.

== Cuisine ==
Menus change periodically, but the kitchen has consistently offered American table-service dishes presented with formal names drawn from the setting. Breakfast has typically included pastries followed by a choice of cooked entrées such as eggs, steak and eggs, or baked quiche. Lunch and dinner entrées have centred on beef tenderloin, chicken, seafood and a plant-based option, with desserts themed to the film, including a clock-themed chocolate dessert referring to the stroke of midnight in the story. Children's menus offer smaller portions of similar dishes.

Meals are sold at a single fixed price for adults and children, with the character experience included. Alcoholic drinks have been available since December 2016, when Cinderella's Royal Table was among the first additional Magic Kingdom restaurants permitted to serve beer and wine after [[Be Our Guest Restaurant]] had done so alone from 2012.

== Character dining ==
Cinderella appears in the Grand Hall, while a rotating cast of princesses visits the dining room. The line-up varies and is not guaranteed, but has commonly included Snow White, Aurora, Ariel and Jasmine, with others appearing at times. Characters sign autographs, pose for photographs and move from table to table rather than performing a stage show, so the meal proceeds at the pace of a normal table-service sitting.

== See also ==
* [[Cinderella Castle]]
* [[Magic Kingdom]]
* [[Be Our Guest Restaurant]]
* [[The Crystal Palace (restaurant)]]

== References ==
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[[Category:Restaurants]]
[[Category:Magic Kingdom]]
[[Category:Fantasyland]]
[[Category:1971 establishments in Florida]]