Mouse Extra

The Rainforest Cafe is currently the only sit down restaurant at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. As such, waits can be rather long even with priority seating. You can enter from both inside the park or from outside the gates. If you enter from inside the park, you must walk through the rather large gift shop to get to the front desk. This desk is located near the huge aquarium of pretty tropical fish. In fact, there are fish swimming over your head. If the wait is long (which happens all too frequently), you can enjoy the gem-like fish or peruse the gift shop, which is overpriced but fun.

The restaurant itself is massive. The decor as you can imagine is jungle themed. You are surrounded by the flora and fauna of the deep tropics. Every fifteen minutes or so, the jungle comes alive. The gorillas pound their chests or yell, the leopard swings his tail and roars, the birds chirp incessantly. This racket lasts a few moments and is accompanied by a thunderstorm. The kids love it. I would, however, advise you to let toddlers know this will happen to avoid startling the kiddies and putting them on edge.

Like the restaurant, the menu itself is massive. There are many of your typical appetizer choices like shrimp, wings and mozzarella sticks only with fancy tropical sounding names. One of the more interesting items is the Caribe Chicken which is essentially chicken tenders with a coconut curry sauce. There are also several soup and salad offerings including the Jungle Safari soup which is a zesty vegetable, bean and sausage concoction.

For the main course, there are again many choices. You can have dinner salads, burgers or wraps with names like the Rumble in the Jungle wrap or Bamba’s Barbeque Wrap. The cafe also serves up personal pizzas with toppings like barbeque chicken (catching the theme here), pepperoni, or roasted shrimp. For something more substantial, you can go to numerous choice of seafood, poultry or pasta. One of the specialties is Rasta Pasta, a dish of pasta, chicken, broccoli, red peppers and basil in a walnut pesto sauce. It may sound good but I would avoid it. Like much of the menu, its mediocre. To finish up, there are exotic sounding desserts like the Sparkling Volcano, the Amazon Apple Cobbler, or the Gorillas in the Mist.

Although the place can be fun, it is by no means great. The food can be heavy and, despite the adventurous names, quite boring. It is the only sit down place in the entire park which may in part explain its popularity. That will soon change with a new Asian-themed table service restaurant which will hopefully be a step up. It should be noted that many WDW restaurants have less expensive lunch menus for the bargain hunters. Not so here, so do yourself a favor and grab something at the Flame Tree Barbeque or the Tusker House, two of the finest counter service establishments Disney has to offer.