The California Grill is a signature restaurant on the top floor of Disney’s Contemporary Resort. Besides the wide variety of delicious food described as California cuisine, including steaks, seafood, a wonderful pork dish & terrific sushi; the view is one that is not to be missed!
On a recent trip to Walt Disney World, we could not get an advanced dining reservation so we ate in the lounge. I almost think I enjoyed it as much as eating in the restaurant! We still had to check in on the 2nd floor of the Contemporary Resort. We explained that we wanted to eat in the lounge and waited for an escort up in the private elevator for the California Grill. When we arrived on the 15th floor we were amazed by the wall-size wine cooler filled with over 300 different types of wines, mostly from California.
Since we arrived pretty early, between 5 & 5:30 pm, we got a prime seat by the window with an awesome view of Magic Kingdom and Seven Seas Lagoon with the surrounding resorts. Our server, Rachel, came over to take our drink orders – I ordered a glass of Riff pinot grigio and my husband Jared had a Orange Ave Wit. We also ordered 2 sushi rolls, the Dragon Roll & California Combination roll. Both were outstanding. Another favorite is the Spicy Kazan roll, it definitely has a kick to it but it’s really delicious!! All items on the regular menu can be ordered while dining in the lounge.
A great perk of eating at the lounge is they have charging devices for your phones. They have a variety of cords attached to the device, but it did not have the lightning cable for the iPhone 6, luckily I had one in my bag and was able to plug it in the device and charge my phone while enjoying our dinner.
We sat and relaxed with our drinks & sushi and were not rushed at all! Our servers kept checking on us, but let us sit and enjoy the sunset. After we ate, we went out on one of the three observation decks. We chose the one overlooking Magic Kingdom; there is another one on the other side of the restaurant where you can view Epcot in the distance.
Since we enjoyed an early dinner, we did not wait for the fireworks. Our server let us know we could return to watch the fireworks from the observation deck, we just had to show our dinner receipt at the check-in desk.
California Grill is always a must-do for us on every trip!
