Archive for January 7th, 2010

Nostalgia reigns at the Hollywood Brown Derby, appropriately located on Hollywood Boulevard in Disney’s Hollywood Studios.  It’s a recreation of the famous California restaurant – the walls covered with caricatures of the stars and the menu featuring some of the original  items, served by a crisply-attired staff.

The main dining room has a warm and clubby atmosphere with dark woods and dozens of wonderful drawings.

A meal at this Signature Restaurant is available as part of the Fantasmic! Dinner Package and the special experience, “Lunch with an Imagineer,” is held here in the small and private Bamboo Room.

Review: Disney has gone to great lengths to replicate the design and detail of the original, but the elegant ambiance of that Tinseltown icon, where diners dressed to impress, has been lost in a sea of shorts and sandals.  The “business casual” dress code of the Signature restaurants, never really enforced, truly falls by the wayside in this venue, the only one located inside a park.

Although I’m not personally blown away by the highly-touted grapefruit cake, the Cobb Salad, made from Bob Cobb’s original recipe, is a reminder of the reason this dish has endured.  Overall, the menu has escaped the homogenization that’s befallen so many other Disney restaurants and still features distinctive choices.

While the food is probably the best available inside the parks, the dining experience itself feels decidedly un-Disney.  This may be a plus for many but in Disney’s Hollywood Studios, which boasts the most amazingly-themed venues imaginable in the Sci-Fi Dine-In and 50’s Prime Time Café, it seems a bit colorless by comparison.

Currently, Disney has chosen to offer the same menu for both lunch and dinner which makes it a wonderful dinner option, but a rather expensive and heavy meal for lunch.

Menus

Lunch and Dinner
Dessert
Tea
Wine

Hollywood Brown Derby

Disney’s Hollywood Studios

11:30 a.m. to time depending on park closing

Park admission required