Be Our Guest Restaurant
Be Our Guest Restaurant is a table-service restaurant in Fantasyland at Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World. Set inside the Beast's castle from Beauty and the Beast (1991), it seats about 550 guests across three dining rooms drawn from the film. It opened for previews on November 19, 2012, and held its grand opening on December 6, 2012, as the centrepiece restaurant of the New Fantasyland expansion.
History
The restaurant was announced at the D23 Expo in 2009 as part of the Fantasyland expansion, the largest in the park's history, which roughly doubled the land's size. The Beast's castle was built on a hill above the new area using forced perspective, so that a relatively small structure reads as a distant mountain fortress. The restaurant occupies the ground level beneath it, reached by a stone bridge across a rocky gorge.
When it opened, Be Our Guest operated in two formats: a counter-service lunch, at which guests ordered at terminals or in advance and food was brought to their tables, and a conventional table-service dinner. That hybrid model was new to Magic Kingdom. A counter-service breakfast was added in 2015. Over time the formats converged, and the restaurant moved to a fixed-price table-service menu for lunch and dinner, with a set selection of appetisers, entrées and a shared dessert course.
Be Our Guest also marked a policy change for the park. Magic Kingdom had served no alcohol since 1971, a practice dating to Walt Disney's policy at Disneyland. Be Our Guest became the first restaurant in the park permitted to sell beer and wine, chosen to match its French setting, when it opened in 2012. It remained the only such location until December 2016, when several other table-service restaurants in the park began serving alcohol.
Setting
Guests enter through a hall of armour and stained glass into one of three rooms. The Grand Ballroom recreates the setting of the film's ballroom sequence, with a high domed ceiling painted with cherubs, chandeliers, tall arched windows and a view of falling snow outside. It is the largest of the three rooms.
The West Wing is smaller and darker, representing the forbidden part of the castle. It contains the enchanted rose under a glass bell jar, with petals that periodically fall, and a portrait of the Prince that appears to change into the Beast when lightning flashes. The third room, opened as the Rose Gallery and later known as the Castle Gallery, is lined with paintings and tapestries of Belle and the Beast, centred on a large rotating figure of the couple dancing, presented as a music box.
The Beast has traditionally made appearances during dinner, walking through the dining rooms and receiving guests in his study after the meal. He does not visit tables in the manner of a standard character meal, and appearances have varied in later years.
Cuisine
The menu is French-inspired, reflecting the film's setting. Long-running dishes have included French onion soup, escargot, grilled beef with pommes frites, poulet rouge chicken, and pork tenderloin, with menus revised periodically. The best-known item is the dessert nicknamed the Grey Stuff, a cookies-and-cream mousse served on or alongside cake; its name quotes a line in the song "Be Our Guest", in which Lumière urges Belle to try the dish because it is delicious. Children's menus offer smaller portions and simpler preparations.
Reception and demand
Reservations for the restaurant were heavily oversubscribed from its opening, and for several years it was among the most sought-after bookings at Walt Disney World. Reviewers have generally treated the setting as the principal attraction, with the Grand Ballroom and West Wing singled out as unusually faithful recreations of animated-film interiors for a working restaurant.