50's Prime Time Café
50's Prime Time Café is a table-service restaurant in the Echo Lake area of Disney's Hollywood Studios in Walt Disney World, Florida. It recreates an American family home of the 1950s, in which guests are treated as members of the household, served comfort food by staff playing relatives, and gently scolded for poor table manners. One of the park's original restaurants, it opened with Disney-MGM Studios on May 1, 1989.
History
When Disney-MGM Studios opened in 1989, its restaurants were themed to the park's subjects of film and television. The Prime Time Café took the domestic sitcom as its subject: a dining room built as a series of 1950s kitchens and living areas, at a moment when the television comedies it referenced were about thirty years old and within living memory for many adult guests.
The concept proved durable. Its success encouraged Disney to develop a second strongly themed restaurant for the park, the Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater Restaurant, which opened in 1991. While other opening-era attractions and restaurants at the park have closed or been replaced, the Prime Time Café has continued in largely its original form.
Experience
The entrance area resembles a family living room of the period, with armchairs, lace curtains and black-and-white televisions. The dining rooms extend the idea into kitchens, each fitted with Formica-topped tables, patterned wallpaper, period appliances, decorative plates and other domestic kitsch of the decade. Televisions at many tables play a loop of excerpts from 1950s American sitcoms and programmes, among them Leave It to Beaver, Topper, Father Knows Best and I Love Lucy material.
The defining element is the service. Servers introduce themselves as relatives — a mother, aunt, uncle or cousin — and address the table as family. Guests may be reminded to keep elbows off the table, to finish their vegetables and to help clear up, and a guest who refuses greens may have them returned, theatrically, as part of dessert. The performance is pitched as teasing rather than discipline, and staff generally moderate it for guests, including children, who do not wish to take part.
Attached to the restaurant is the Tune-In Lounge, a small bar styled as another living room, which serves the restaurant's drinks and a limited food menu and can be used without a reservation for the dining room.
Food and drink
The menu centres on the home cooking the setting implies: fried chicken, pot roast, meatloaf, chicken pot pie and similar dishes, with vegetables served family-style in spirit if not in form. Milkshakes are a long-standing speciality, and the peanut butter and jelly shake in particular has become closely associated with the restaurant. Desserts follow the same domestic theme, with items such as Dad's Brownie Sundae appearing over the years. Lunch and dinner are served, and advance reservations are recommended.