By Robert Niles: Who's hungry?
Let's talk about fancy dining for this week's Vote of the Week. Last week, my family and I got the chance to have dinner at Epcot's new Monsieur Paul restaurant, which last December replaced the multi-Theme Park Insider Award-winning Bistro de Paris. Disney's found a place for fine dining its theme park resorts around the world, and Monsieur Paul is clearly Walt Disney World's most ambitious in-park restaurant. But where does it rank among the best of the best of Disney's other top table-service restaurants around the world? That's what I'm putting up for a vote today.
I've selected what I believe to be the most ambitious fine-dining restaurant at each of Disney's multi-park theme park resorts: Disneyland, Walt Disney World, Disneyland Paris, and Tokyo Disney. To fill out the field with a fifth option, I've added a second restaurant from Tokyo DisneySea, which I believe to be on par with the other four for the highest levels of cuisine, ambiance and service.
Of course, very few of us have had the good fortune to eat at all of these restaurants, to make an in-person judgment about which is best. So let's make this an "aspirational" vote, if you will. Where would you most want to eat among these five restaurants, assuming you had the budget to go to its park and enjoy a meal at that restaurant? Let's assume that you're only having the meal at the park, so no picking a restaurant solely based on the park where it's located. So we've taken price and location out of the equation -- we're deciding solely on the basis of cuisine, menu and setting. Which is the restaurant that really gets you excited?
To help you learn more about these choices, I've linked my reviews and the Theme Park Insider reader reviews for each restaurant, in the order in which I dined at them:
S.S. Columbia Dining Room at Tokyo DisneySea
Robert's review | Readers' reviews
Magellan's at Tokyo DisneySea
Robert's review | Readers' reviews
Walt's at Disneyland Paris
Robert's review | Readers' reviews
Carthay Circle Restaurant at Disney California Adventure
Robert's review | Readers' reviews
Monsieur Paul at Epcot
Robert's review | Readers' reviews
These five will be strong contenders for this year's Theme Park Insider Award for the world's best theme park restaurant, which we will announce this July 4. But other restaurants will contend for the award, which will go to the in-park table service restaurant with the highest average reader rating. So I'd like to make a pitch for you to click over and submit a rating for any of these restaurants where you've dined in the past year.
The ever-popular Mythos remains a candidate, of course, but we could use more votes for the Big Five restaurants linked above, as well as for these other top restaurants around the world:
Auberge de Cendrillon at Disneyland Paris
KT's Grill at Universal Studios Singapore
Lombard's Seafood Grille at Universal Studios Florida
The Hollywood Brown Derby at Disney's Hollywood Studios
Thank you, as always, for reading (and rating on) Theme Park Insider!
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