Park Parent Perspective #4: The Sit-Down Lunch Debate
A well-timed long lunch can save your afternoon at Disney World with kids.
We’ve gone to Disney World multiple times with our toddler, and one of the most common elements of our park days has been that we’d snack our way through breakfast/lunch and keep the day moving. We knew that an early afternoon nap was on the horizon, so stopping for a full meal didn’t seem like a good use of our limited daily park time. We flipped the script on this trip and I can safely say that I’ve changed my opinion on in-park meal planning.
On past trips, we had planned strategic restful attractions for each park to give our toddler (and ourselves) a break from buzzing around from ride to ride in the Florida heat. I think these have served us really well in the past, so here's what we used as our "break" attractions at each park:
Magic Kingdom: Enchanted Tiki Room + Dole Whip (specifically, a Fanta Orange Dole Whip Float from Sunshine Tree Terrace)
Epcot: Awesome Planet (underrated!) + Living With the Land combo in the Land Pavilion
Hollywood Studios: Frozen Sing-Along (admittedly not quite as restful as the others depending on how much you participate in the sing-along)
Animal Kingdom: we have only done Animal Kingdom once with our toddler, so we haven't found our go-to for this park... yet!
Our first experience with a sit-down lunch at the parks came on our most recent trip, at Magic Kingdom: we had a great morning bouncing between our lightning lanes, and our toddler was somehow patient enough to participate in Enchanted Tales With Belle but she was definitely starting to get tired. It was only 12:45 and we weren’t expecting to be done for the day that early, so my wife suggested lunch at Crystal Palace instead to slow things down and give our daughter a chance to reset. We got a walk-up table within 10 minutes, and spent about an hour eating lunch and getting pictures with the characters.
By the time we were ready to head back into the park our toddler was refreshed and ready for more! Instead of an early exit, we lasted until around 3:30 without any afternoon tantrums or meltdowns, and I am convinced that we wouldn’t have made it nearly as long without that lunch break.
We made a similar last minute decision to get a table at Garden Grill on our last day at the parks, this time with both toddler and infant showing signs of fatigue from the warmer weather and five days at WDW starting to add up. We had a mid-morning meltdown from our toddler while waiting in line at one of the Flower & Garden booths, and she was struggling to recover fully after that. We were at a crossroads at noon once again, and my wife suggested we try to get a walk up table and see if we can make the most of our last day instead of heading back to the hotel early. And it worked for a second time! We had a nice slow lunch, regained our energy, and ended up lasting at Epcot until 3:30 before walking back to the hotel.
Traveling with a toddler (and now an infant too) has made time management a huge part of our in-trip decision making. We've never been the type to try and fit every single ride into a day, but knowing that we have a lot time restraints built into the day for things like diaper changes, bottles, and the nap countdown that sends us back to the hotel, we do try to make the most out of the time we get. Until now, my wife and I were both in agreement that taking the time to have a sit-down lunch service would only chip away even more at the time we had with the girls in the park. But we've got a new outlook on planning out park days after our last trip!