During a recent stay at Disney’s Caribbean Beach Resort, I had the opportunity to try the new Disney Family Night Dinner offering from Centertown Market, the cafeteria-style quick service restaurant at the resort.
I was intrigued when Disney World announced this new dining option as bringing to-go food back to our resort room happens to be one of my favorite things about a family vacation – second only to room service, which can be far more costly. There’s something about sitting around with family in your comfy clothes, or jammies as the case might be and enjoying dinner together.
As we previously reported, the Disney Family Night Dinner at Centertown Market is priced at $79 plus tax and includes the following:
- Roasted Jamaican-style Chicken
- Fried Yucca
- Cilantro Rice
- Seasonal Vegetables
- Caribbean Pull-apart Rolls with Onion Jam and Guava Butter
- Decorate-your-own Mickey and Minnie Cookies
Gasparilla Grill at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort & Spa has a completely different menu for their Disney Family Night Dinner offering; you can read about theirs at the link above.
This dinner package needs to be pre-ordered via Mobile Order in the My Disney Experience app. Most importantly, Mobile Orders are spaced apart so if you’re wanting to pick up your food at a certain time, you’ll want to put your order in early in the day. I put my order in by 9:30 a.m. and was able to select the first available pickup window of 5:15 – 5:30 p.m. You’ll still need to hop into the app once you’ve arrived at the restaurant to alert the cast members that you’re there. It was about 20-minutes after I arrived before I received a text message telling me that my order was ready to be picked up.
A word of caution – bring someone with you when you go to pick up your order. There are two large packages to carry and you’ll need both hands as one is a box and the other is a large shopping bag with handles. A cast member asked if he could help me out and I first thought he meant that he’d help me bring it out to my car which was right out front. He was actually offering to help me get it to one of the tables which made perfect sense too, but wasn’t what I needed. As soon as I walked out of the front entrance to head to my vehicle, the sky completely opened up as it does here in Florida. All of a sudden, we had an instant monsoon outside so I sat down with my packages and waited for a good while (about 20 more minutes) for the rain to settle down. When I realized that it was not slowing down, I decided to make a run for it which posed a bit of a challenge while also trying to hold an umbrella. I’m sure you can picture the hilarity of it all. Just take my advice and bring an extra set of hands. You’ll be glad you did.
As far as the food goes, this meal is said to feed three or four and I’d say that’s pretty accurate. If you have any big eaters in your party, I’d say to stick with it feeding three. The big bucket of jerk chicken had eight pieces, so plenty to go around. The chicken was really good as long as you like jerk seasoning. The sides were plentiful as well with a good amount of Cilantro Rice and roasted veggies. I really loved the rice – cilantro is one of my very favorite herbs, so if you like it too, then you’ll love this rice. I will say that it had some crunchier grains of rice in it; almost as though it had been sautéed a little. It was so good!
The veggies were lightly seasoned (with just salt & pepper) and delicious but my very favorite side was the pull-apart rolls that were served with onion jam and guava butter. Friends, these rolls are just delicious. The only caveat for me was that they were no longer hot by the time I got to my room and with no microwave, I had no way to heat them up just a bit as I would’ve liked to. I’ve had the pleasure of enjoying these little beauties fresh out of the oven at Sebastian’s Bistro and there really is no comparison.
Dessert was a super fun part of the whole experience! It came with four undecorated sugar cookies and two that were already decorated as Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse. There were three pastry bags full of icing; one red, one black, and one white, along with three small containers of different-colored Mickey sprinkles. Kids will really love this edible activity and the best part of all is that you get to eat your creations!
My most favorite part about the whole thing is the game that was also included. Well, let me be more specific. There are six buttons that are used in this game and I just love them. I love Disney buttons and these are brand new designs that were created especially for this game making them pretty darn cool. They’ll eventually be given a home on the corkboard in my office because they are just that cute.
All in all, if you are a family of four and at least one is a child, you should do well cost-wise with this meal. I feel like the value is there when you consider that it’s $20 per person for dinner and includes dessert and a game (with all those buttons!). You’ll still need to get your own drinks if you want those, however.
Have you had the chance to try out this family dinner? I’d love to hear what you thought about it so please share in the comments!