Food Review: Quick Breakfast at Gaston’s Tavern

After an early rope drop and a few headliners, a Disney dreamer may work up a hunger ahead of lunch time, but many eateries in the Magic Kingdom are closed until 11am or later (and the places that are open are likely swarmed (looking at you, Main Street Bakery)). Even most snack carts are unmanned for the first couple of hours of park operation! So where can one find breakfast without blowing a huge hole in the touring plan?

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Gaston’s Tavern is a counter service eatery in New Fantasyland, with a menu primarily focused on a giant pork shank. Located deep in the park just east of Be Our Guest Restaurant and conveniently nearby the forthcoming Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, Gaston’s is usually fairly quiet in the morning and offers breakfast-passable faire.

Breakfast at Gaston's

The cinnamon roll is a major staple at Gaston’s, a popular dish served all day. As seen in the photograph, it is quite large and should satisfy the voracious appetite generated during a rope drop day. Multiple icings of lightly distinguished flavors are strewn atop a fluffy complex of cinnamon-laden bread-cave-maze. This cinnamon roll was obviously constructed to impress, but its beauty will likely be overlooked as parkgoers ravenously cram their face with food so that they can beat the crowd to Monster’s Inc. Laugh Floor. This is a good cinnamon roll. Unfortunately, the marvel of its craftsmanship was degraded by serving temperature; the roll I received, herein pictured, was positively room temperature, causing the icings to congeal into a slightly-less-pleasurable sugary paste. The roll would’ve been much better if it was 10-20 degrees hotter.

Cinnamon Roll FINAL SCORE: 6/10, points deducted primarily due to bad serving temperature.

Sadly, such glowing descriptions cannot be rightfully ascribed to the other elements of this breakfast. The pictured “fruit cup” was pulled from a refrigerator where it probably sat for years. The mass of the “fruit” was very hard, while the external skin was pure mush from soaking in the slow, eeked excretions from a bunch of fruit that’d been refrigerated in the same plastic container for an extended time period. I’ve had this same experience with other “fruit cups” at Walt Disney World, and that’s really sad. If you want to eat fruit cups in the parks, bring your own. This type of fruit cup is the universal fruit cup sold at WDW.

Fruit Cup FINAL SCORE: 1/10, 1 point because it was fruit at least at some point, but disgraceful and embarrassing. Almost not real food anymore. Disney can and should do better. Maybe someone should send a sample to the health department for testing.

lefous_brew_menu

LeFou’s Brew was a respectable showing, but ultimately it just wasn’t my bag (or, brew?). The menu described it in detail that made it sound appetizing, as I enjoy both frozen apple juice and toasted marshmallows, but the fusion of these with a passion fruit foam blend caused deep confusion and conflict among my tastebuds. It didn’t immediately register as disgusting, as each flavor was distinguishable and I liked the apple juice and marshmallow parts, but I found the passion fruit mixture encroaching and overtaking the other flavors. This gave rise to a naturally-occurring revulsion as I ate. My brain would say, “OK, I need a drink now”, but my tongue would try to create a diversion and say, “Hmm, that’s nice, but I really don’t want this thing anymore”. My attempts to override my natural repulsion were ultimately failures and I dumped most of the brew and replaced it with water.

That said, this is one of the unique menu items that makes Disney dining a noteworthy experience and defies the conventional wisdom regarding “theme park food”. Disney should keep trying to provide custom foodstuffs like this. They should just make them taste better.

LeFou’s Brew FINAL SCORE: 4/10, some people may think it tastes good but I just couldn’t stomach it. It was a nice try. 4 points for effort.

All of this cost me 20 bucks.

Thus passed my breakfast at Gaston’s Tavern, in New Fantasyland, in Magic Kingdom Park, in Walt Disney World Resort, in Orlando, Florida, in the United States, on the planet Earth. It wasn’t that good, but I liked the cinnamon roll.

BREAKFAST FINAL SCORE: 4/10, 4 points for a mostly edible cinnamon roll and a good try with LeFou’s Brew.

Preview: Epcot’s Flower and Garden Festival 2014

The Flower and Garden Festival doesn’t officially kick off for another day or two, but spring is already in the air around Epcot.

With WDWTools, you can enjoy meals at Le Cellier Steakhouse and other hard-to-access Epcot restaurants on short notice along with the flowery renditions of your favorite Disney characters.

Major pricing overhaul

We’ve just released a major pricing overhaul for WDWTools. There are now two great, cost-effective options to watch reservations through ADR Sniper.

By popular demand, an option for a one-time fee of $25 $10 per watch has been added.

Subscription access is still available to elite members. Elite memberships are on sale now at the rate of $99.99 per year, which is even cheaper than our current monthly subscription, and entitles you not only to unlimited ADR Sniper access (up to 5 days at once with base, or 10 days at once with the monthly extended watch product) but also to participation in members-only raffles and steep discounts and exclusive access on our other products, which will soon be released.

Only annual subscriptions will recur. One-time watches will never cause recurrence. To create a one-time watch, create an account and enter a watch. No credit card is needed to do this. You will be prompted for payment information when you choose to activate your watch.

This new pricing structure allows us to address new audiences and continue to expand rapidly, especially as we release new products in the near future.

Price Reduced for 2014!

NOTE: This information is outdated. The post is kept for historical significance. Please visit our pricing page for the latest pricing information.

We’re excited to announce that our already low introductory subscription rate has been reduced to $9.55/mo, effective immediately. This new, reduced rate will allow even more people to fill their Disney resolutions and eat at Disney restaurants on short notice throughout 2014.

Subscribers will also enjoy our other tools, currently under development, as they are released throughout the new year.

This change has been applied retroactively. Subscribers that signed up at the old rate have already had their subscriptions adjusted to reflect the new rate. We’ve thrown in a few bonus days for all current subscribers. Current subscribers’ accounts have been extended 30 extra days to reflect the new pricing.

Here’s to a great, spontaneous 2014, filled with good food, drink, and Disney magic, maximized by WDWTools. Celebrate with us by signing up now!

ADR Challenge: Pre-RD Breakfast @ Crystal Palace (Rigid): DONE

RESERVATION BOOKED 17 days, 4 hours, 42 minutes after watch was placed.

This is awesome because it’s _all_ of the ADRs I wanted for my mid-January trip. I didn’t even know I was going to be having this trip a month ago, and now I have reservations for BOG, CRT, ‘Ohana, and pre-RD CP.


RESERVATION FOUND 10 days, 21 hours, 50 minutes after watch was placed. This slot actually stayed open for about five hours, but I was unable to book during that time span.


I want pre-rope-drop breakfast in the MK at CP on Friday morning. Post-RD breakfasts are easily available at the moment, but not pre-RD.

ADR Challenge: Be Our Guest, Under 30 Days (Flexible): DONE

UPDATE

RESERVATION BOOKED 2 hours 12 minutes after watch was placed.

Two desirable times opened up. I was away from my computer when I got the mail, so I clicked the link to book the time slot I preferred…

which brought up the booking page on my phone.

And proceeded to book. πŸ™‚

We’re still waiting for a second chance on our rigid day because we missed the first reservation opening, but if we can fudge things around a bit, we can typically find something much faster. Of course, rigid days are fine, and as shown in that post, can also be found quickly, but as in all things Disney, it pays to be flexible.


Earlier, we described the process of watching for ADR at Be Our Guest on a rigid schedule, where we only have one available night in our plan. This works, but it can take a longer time to find an opening. If we’re a bit more flexible (perhaps we have the Park Hopper option, for instance, or want to prioritize our trip around ADRs), things can work out more quickly.

Our watch looks like this:

we save it, get our pretty icon:

And wait. Will update.

ADR Not-So-Challenge: Easy Booking at Flying Fish Cafe

So we’ve done features on booking an ADR at Be Our Guest and Ohana on short notice, two places where ADRs for desirable times can be hard to come by. But what about a place where it’s not so hard to book an ADR? Disney has many restaurants and usually at least some of them have availability.

Let’s choose Flying Fish Cafe. We’ll say we want to have dinner there on Jan 16.

OK, all ready to go! Much easier than going through that whole shebang on Disney’s site, issuer of hundreds of requests, killer of devices < 1 GB of RAM. Remember how ADR Sniper is actually much easier on Disney than their own system? Yeah.

Less than five minutes later, we get an email and a text (because I enabled SMS notification, which is free of charge).

There’s several times available. I just have to click the link next to the time that I think is most convenient…

and bam! Right to Disney’s booking page.

All neat and spiffy, ready to book an ADR. And because the restaurant we’ve targeted isn’t super high-demand, we can afford to wait for our ideal time to open up, if we choose.

ADR Challenge: Early Dinner at Ohana, Under 30 Days: DONE

UPDATE 1

RESERVATION BOOKED 3 days, 23 hours, and 23 minutes after watch started.

Another one where I was not at my desk.

That was pretty cool! Excited to eat there. Anyone guess how long it would’ve taken me to get this if I was trying by hand? I’ve heard reports of people checking daily for 2+ months and never finding anything … we set up a watch, went about our business, and snagged a res in 4 days. πŸ˜€

A note to Android users: Disney’s bottom-anchored navigation bar is fidgety on Android. You need to zoom your page in and out several times until you find a size where the “next” button appears.


Want dinner at Ohana during our mid-Jan trip. Unfortunately, 9:30 is a little late for me…

Not a big deal. I’m just going to throw together a watch here…

This pretty much shows what I want, but like I said, I can’t eat at 9:30 on the 15th on still be expected to make rope drop the following day. 8pm is probably the absolute latest I could make it. So, since I’m looking for something specific, I ‘m going to just add a time range here…

Cool, my range is added. I hit the “create watch button” and …

we’re all done! Just as with Be Our Guest, we never have to visit the Disney site until we receive a message that our time slot is available. Since we set a specific time range, we’ll only get a notice if something between 5 PM and 8 PM shows up. Sometimes this can take make things take longer, but we’re going to give it a go anyway. Because we have our subscription to ADR Sniper, we can always move things around, add an extra watch that’s less specific, or otherwise improve on-the-fly. It’s also important to note that cancellations primarily will happen closer to the planned booking date, so we may be waiting a while on this — but it sure beats having to manually check it on Disney’s site all day, and still miss the reservation. Stay tuned to learn if we are able to snag this res or not.

ADR Challenge: Be Our Guest, Under 30 Days (Rigid) : DONE

UPDATE 2:

RESERVATION BOOKED 8 days, 23 hours, 13 minutes after setting up the search. It took 7 days for our second chance to materialize, but we were able to get our res with 19 days left.

UPDATE 1:

RESERVATION FOUND 23 hours 45 minutes after setting up my search. Booking failed due to my failure to click button in timely fashion.

WDWTools’ notifier sent me a message at 7:54 PM this evening, showing an available reservation for Jan 14 at 7:40. That sounded good to me! Unfortunately, I didn’t see this mail right away despite the text alert, and when I tried to book it six minutes later it was gone. πŸ™

I will keep my watch active and update again when another opening comes in. We are working on an iteration of the product that would respond to available reservations automatically, removing necessity for individual action.

For more frequent options, one should consider making a more flexible search.


Will be at WDW 1/14 — 1/17 with my wife for our anniversary. I just booked this trip earlier this week, when it was 28 days out. I want some ADRs, but at the moment I’m a little unsure of what exactly. I know I want Be Our Guest,  though. I haven’t set anything up yet. Now I want to make sure I secure my spot.

I start out by logging in at wdwtools.com.

Then, I want to use the ADR Sniper tool to make sure I can get dinner at BOG, so I go to the ADR Sniper section and click “Add New Watch”.

You can see the form for establishing a new watch here. I want to eat at Be Our Guest, so I select that restaurant from the dropdown. And I want Dinner, so I select that too.

As stated above, I want to eat this meal on January 14. It’s a short trip and I want to fit some other ADRs in, so I start and end the search on the same date — Jan 14. It may take a little longer to get this reservation because we are being specific about our date, but I’m confident we’ll find something. If we’re feeling a bit more flexible, we should try searching for a range. Openings are found much faster that way.

I could set up some more specific time ranges if there were other pressures that night, but I still haven’t planned much of the trip out, so I’m ok with being flexible right now. Some other ADRs we try won’t be this way.

Hit save …

… and voila, my watch has been stored.

Believe it or not, that’s it for this part of the work. I don’t have to go to Disney’s site at all. I just have to wait for something to hit my mailbox now. Typically something is found pretty fast, and I’ll update this post with info once that happens. πŸ˜‰