[Update: 10/28/2023. Lunch and dinner shows are back at Tokyo Disneyland, with The Diamond Horseshoe now running a new show called The Diamond Variety Muster several times a day. At the Polynesian Terrace yesterday, we caught a performance of Mickey’s Rainbow Luau, which is showing for both lunch and dinner now. I’ve updated my original post here with a few fresh pics, but I’m not altering the text too much because much of it still holds true even with the end of pandemic restrictions.]
At Tokyo Disney Resort, there aren’t a lot of options for character dining anymore. Previously, at Tokyo Disneyland, you could meet Winnie the Pooh characters in the Crystal Palace Restaurant in Adventureland, while over at Disneysea, you could meet Mickey Mouse and friends in futuristic costumes at the Horizon Bay Restaurant in Port Discovery. However, the resort discontinued the character dining option for these two locations in 2019.
Inside the parks now, you’re limited to lunch and dinner show venues where you’d normally be watching the characters on stage. Except, as a prolonged effect of the pandemic, none of the actual shows are running right now. This leaves the Art Deco buffet restaurant, Chef Mickey, in the Disney Ambassador Hotel as the only current character dining restaurant in Tokyo Disney Resort.
Reservations for Chef Mickey and Show Restaurants
As part of our Vacation Package stay last month at Tokyo Disney Resort, we had lunch at Chef Mickey the first day and the Polynesian Terrace the second day. I had been to both these restaurants once before back in 2016, when I was able to snag Priority Seating reservation tickets for them just by stopping by earlier in the day and inquiring if they had any openings in person.
I’m not sure the walk-up approach would work anymore unless someone happens to do a last-minute cancellation, and you just get lucky and catch it right then. Since the official Tokyo Disney Resort app launched in 2018, the system has become more like that of Walt Disney World, where restaurant reservations become available online in real time and people can snatch them up quickly.
Show restaurants tend to be more exclusive and booked solid well in advance by hotel guests and Vacation Package holders (like we were this time). It’s still worth a try, but just be aware that you could be competing with hardcore Disney fans who are watching the availability of show restaurants like a hawk.
Chef Mickey at the Disney Ambassador Hotel
The current state of Chef Mickey is rather sad, since he’s the only character there and they have him taped off and positioned several feet back in the corner. When I was there in 2016, three other characters — Minnie Mouse and Donald and Daisy Duck — all stopped by the table at various points throughout the meal. This is how character dining usually works, but now you have to wait for them to summon you. Then, you get up from the table and stand in a short line, waiting for your turn to meet Mickey while your mouse-eared pancakes get cold.
The Vacation Package stay was a second honeymoon of sorts, so maybe I just had high expectations, but when you reach the front of the line, the picture police are there to inform you that you’re only allowed one shot of Mickey in his chef hat. It’s kind of funny, actually, because it felt like being in some strict, Disneyfied version of the Soup Nazi’s shop on Seinfeld.
They’re pretty adamant about the picture policy, and I get the whole social distancing part, but when you’ve dropped a cool ¥265,000 on your Vacation Package, it feels like that should buy you a second snap with your iPhone camera. (You do the math, but that yen amount would be about a month’s salary for an English teacher in Japan.) On the bright side, though, the meal itself was a gift from my parents and sister.
When the moment of truth comes at Chef Mickey now, you have to decide if you want a shot of just the character or yourself with the character. We went with the latter and came away with a somewhat awkward pic where Mickey does look a little more mouse-sized, standing back by the wall over my wife’s shoulder. You can see it above, along with the original pictures I took of the characters at Chef Mickey back in 2016.
Polynesian Terrace, The Diamond Horseshoe, and Cape Cod Cook-Off
Before the pandemic, the Polynesian Terrace was the venue for the dinner show Mickey’s Rainbow Luau. I caught this show once, back in 2016, but it’s not the best for taking unobstructed pictures, since the audience is almost level with the stage and you’re looking over people’s heads the whole time.
The stage curtain still has the same rainbow design, but right now, the Polynesian Terrace is just like any other restaurant, serving food without characters at tables with plastic dividers. There used to be another show, Lilo’s Luau & Fun, performed here at lunchtime, but we never managed to see it before it ended in 2020. Instead, we met Lilo at the ‘Ohana character dining breakfast in the Polynesian Village Resort in Florida.
At both The Diamond Horseshoe and the Polynesian Terrace, the characters would come around to the tables during the show, but they’d usually be moving so fast that you wouldn’t really have a chance to get a good picture of them. There was only once back in 2016 during The Diamond Horseshoe Roundup that I encountered a Woody who actually stopped for a second to pose for a picture.
The only show restaurant that Tokyo DisneySea has is Cape Cod Cook-Off, where the show was My Friend Duffy, and you were limited to watching overgrown teddy bears cavort on stage in American Waterfront.
