Carthay Circle Lounge
Carthay Circle Lounge is a lounge and bar on the ground floor of the Carthay Circle Theatre building on Buena Vista Street at Disney California Adventure in the Disneyland Resort, California. It opened on June 15, 2012, together with the Carthay Circle Restaurant upstairs, as the walk-in, no-reservation counterpart to that restaurant's formal dining rooms.[1]
History
The Carthay Circle Theatre building was the centrepiece of Buena Vista Street, the new entrance land built as the final phase of Disney California Adventure's five-year expansion. Disney announced on March 7, 2012 that Cars Land, Buena Vista Street and the Carthay Circle Theatre would open on June 15, 2012, and that the theatre building would contain both an elegant restaurant and a lounge.[2] The park closed on June 14 for final preparations and a media event, and both dining floors opened to the public the next day.
From the beginning the two floors were planned as a pair. The restaurant upstairs, developed under Napa Rose executive chef Andrew Sutton, took reservations and aimed to be the park's premier table-service address; the lounge downstairs was given the quicker, looser brief — in Sutton's words at opening, a place to "relax, share and have fun," serving quick meals and shared plates to guests without a booking.[1] The lounge has kept that role ever since, absorbing walk-up demand the restaurant cannot.
Setting
The building reproduces the Carthay Circle Theatre, the Los Angeles cinema where Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered in 1937, and the restaurant's story is set on that premiere night.[3] The lounge occupies the ground-floor foyer level of the Spanish Colonial Revival building, beneath the tower that anchors the end of Buena Vista Street, with the restaurant above it and the members-only 1901 lounge elsewhere in the same building.[3]
Inside, the tone is Old Hollywood rather than theme-park medieval or cartoon: a central bar, low lounge seating, and displays of photographs and artefacts telling the story of the original theatre and its relationship with the Walt Disney Company, including material from the 1937 premiere. In recent years the building's public rooms have also hosted rotating Walt Disney Archives exhibits, which pass through the lounge's orbit as much as the restaurant's.[3] For guests, the practical effect is a comparatively calm, adult room a few steps from the park's entrance plaza — one of the few places in Disney California Adventure designed for sitting down with a drink rather than queueing with a tray.
Cuisine
The lounge's food was organised at opening into Bites, Rolls, Snacks, Small Plates and Finger Desserts — a menu of shareable dishes rather than courses, designed to accompany drinks or to stand in for a light meal.[1] That structure has proved durable: the lounge continues to serve small plates drawn from the same Southern California kitchen as the restaurant upstairs, in smaller, more casual form.
The bar is the centre of the offer. At opening the lounge poured wine, craft beer and handcrafted sodas alongside cocktails, and it has since become known for an Old Hollywood cocktail programme — classic drinks of the 1930s premiere era, including ice-ball cocktails served with a large single sphere of ice, which became one of the building's signature serves. Because the lounge takes no reservations in the ordinary way the restaurant does, it functions as both the building's bar and its overflow dining room, and its menu changes with the seasons and with the restaurant above it.