California Grill

I’ve joked before that my wife and I are not “Disney adults” or theme park people in general.  That said, once in a while, we end up across Orlando from us on Disney property, and food is always involved on those rare occasions. Usually that means meeting visiting friends or my former co-workers out at Disney Springs, but we recently went upscale.

Every year, I task my wife with deciding where she would like to go to celebrate her birthday — anywhere she wants, the sky’s the limit.  Sometimes she wants something down to Earth, sometimes she aims a little higher.  Some years, I end up bringing in takeout or even cooking for her at home, but I leave the decision up to her and try my damnest to make her happy.  This year, she suggested a place we had never been, but both of us had always heard about: the California Grill (https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/dining/contemporary-resort/california-grill/), the high-end restaurant on the 15th floor of the Contemporary Resort at Walt Disney World.  The hotel is an example of brutalist architecture that seems like both a time capsule from the 1970s and an idea of what the future would have looked like at the time.  Along with the Polynesian Resort next door, the Contemporary was one of the two original hotels that opened when Walt Disney World opened in 1971, and believe me, it looks like it!

The Contemporary is noteworthy to me too, because it was the hotel my family stayed at for our two (count ’em: TWO!) Disney family trips when my brother and I were kids, back in the late ’80s.  My family is definitely not “of the travelers,” and trips out of Miami were exceptionally rare for us.  I realize Disney has always been a splurge and an extravagance, but it wasn’t until I moved to Orlando as an adult that I realized how big a deal it was that we stayed on Disney property, as opposed to any of the hundreds of independent, off-site hotels between Orlando and Kissimmee.  And the Contemporary, which costs and arm and a leg now, surely wasn’t cheap back then either.

A big selling point for my dad was being able to park at the hotel and not drive again the entire trip.  A futuristic monorail connects the Contemporary, the Polynesian, the Grand Floridian Resort (a super-high-end hotel that looks like a big Southern plantation, bless their hearts), and the Magic Kingdom and Epcot parks.  Of course we rode that monorail as a family, and it might have led to my lifelong love of public transportation AND tours where I can explore as much of an unfamiliar area as possible.  That monorail appealed to me more than most of the relatively pedestrian rides inside the parks (keeping in mind that we didn’t ride Space Mountain, and most of the Magic Kingdom rides back then were aimed at really little kids).  But I have digressed enough!

So to access the toney California Grill, you check in on the second floor of the hotel and take a seat until they contact you.  Then you ride a special elevator up to the 15th floor, where the restaurant is.  It is a huge dining room with a long, open kitchen and glass windows all around.  One of the major selling points is being able to watch the nightly fireworks through all the windows when they start at 8 PM.  Unfortunately, I was only able to score a reservation for 5:20, but they will let you reenter to watch the fireworks if you show your receipt from an earlier dinner.

As is typical at Disney, the service was impeccable.  That’s that “Disney magic” in action, where everyone is warm, welcoming, and helpful.  Even if I scoff sometimes about Disney, I have nothing but respect for friendly and professional service.  We got a comfortable booth (that I requested with our online reservation), and our “cast member” server, the charming Charmaine, wished my wife a happy birthday.

She explained that the California Grill serves a price fixe menu: for $89 per adult diner, each person chooses an appetizer, an entrée, and a dessert from a list of multiple options.  We had already studied the menu in advance, being studious little nerds.  A lot of dishes included mushrooms, because fine-dining chefs loooove mushrooms, but I’m always on the lookout for them — my culinary Kryptonite.

Charmaine brought us a basket of warm, freshly baked rolls, with the lightest, crispiest exterior crusts and warm, fluffy interiors.  I should have photographed a cross-section, but trust me, you would want to shrink down and curl up for the coziest nap ever inside these rolls.

They came with a board featuring soft, salted butter in that fancy shape that only higher-end restaurants use for butter and occasionally ice cream, as well as a bread dip of olive oil, tomatoes, garlic, and herbs.  As anyone who knows us might guess, my wife went for the butter and I went for the bread dip.

It wasn’t long before we received our apps.  I went out of my way to pick things I knew my wife would want to at least try, hoping to share everything.  This was the barbecue American eel roll, a sushi roll with unagi (the fresh and tender grilled eel), avocado, cucumber, “dragon sauce” (a savory, sweet, sticky brown sauce), toasted sesame seeds, and crispy garlic.  It was great.  I love sushi rolls and I always enjoy eel, but I’ve never seen one served like this, with the whole long tail of the eel. 

My wife was really excited about the farmer’s market salad on the menu, and to be fair, neither of us had ever seen a salad like this before: petit mixed greens (normal enough), roasted baby beets (we are both new to appreciating beets), poached pears (she loves pears!), pear gel (fine dining chefs love their gels!), chocolate biscotti (I had always dismissed biscotti as God’s joke on people who like cookies, but props for putting it in a salad), vanilla “pudding” (WHY is “pudding” in quotation marks?!), and citrus vinaigrette dressing.  This salad was a huge hit for her, and seeing it on the menu was probably what made up her mind about coming here in the first place.  As far as we could tell, the vanilla “pudding” looked and tasted just like vanilla pudding, hold the quotes.

My wife chose the seared halibut for her entrée… just for the halibut.  I don’t mind calling it a main course, but I don’t like “mains” on a menu and I especially don’t like “proteins.”  This lovely seared rectangular prism was served atop bourbon-brown butter risotto with a slice of fondant sweet potato, sweet potato purée (fine dining chefs also love their purées), sweet potato leaves, kale (she has been on a kale kick ever since that dinner), toasted pecans, and a cranberry vinaigrette dressing.  We both wondered if the halibut might be a little overcooked, since the texture was more firm than we expected.  I think she liked some of the components of this dish more than the fish itself.  A lot of it came home with us, and she invited me to finish it off the next day.

As for me, I chose the pan-seared lamb strip loin, since lamb is always one of my favorite meats (not “proteins”).  I requested my lamb rare, and it came back perfectly rare.  It was served with roasted root vegetables, baby brussels sprouts, beautiful thin-sliced radishes, and crispy fried parsnip chips over a bed of parsnip-celeriac Purée, with a juniper-cranberry-cabernet demi-glaze (a very rich, delicious, savory-sweet-tart reduction).  

I had to take a picture of the “back” of the dish too, because it was such a marvel to behold.  It reminded me of the artful plating at the legendary Noma restaurant in Copenhagen (not that I’ll ever go to Noma, or probably even to Copenhagen), where the food looks like little terrarium environments for wee Danish fae.  While the lamb was cooked as well as lamb can be cooked, and the demi-glace was awesome, I must admit the dish lacked the strong flavors I always seek.  It was on the bland side!

Because I had said in the reservation that we were celebrating my wife’s birthday, Charmaine brought us out a small slice of festive “funfetti” cake, which was unexpected and unnecessary, but sweet.  Very, VERY sweet.  The icing was pretty heavy and super-sweet.

For her actual dessert off the price fixe menu, my wife went with the chocolate-hazelnut tart, artfully presented with orbs of chocolate-hazelnut praline crémeux served over a long, thin chocolate shortbread cookie,  topped with candied hazelnuts and decorated with dots of espresso crème anglaise.  I didn’t try a nibble of this one, but she seemed to like it. 

I chose the lemon mousse and olive oil-poppyseed cake, which sounds a lot weirder than it actually was.  The presentation was gorgeous for the small, rectangular Meyer lemon-olive oil cake, studded with poppyseeds, topped with lemon cream, and decorated with dots of blood orange gel.  (Fancy chefs love gels!)  The pretty latticework on top was the thinnest, crispiest , most delicate sugar structure, but maybe I’m wrong, because it almost felt like a delicate, crispy cookie. 

After the hour drive down to Disney property and the long, luxurious birthday dinner, my wife didn’t feel like sticking around for the fireworks or revisiting the 1988 Saboscrivner family monorail tour, so we headed for home.  Both of us agreed that we were glad we went to the California Grill, but nothing amazed or astonished us enough to return.  This will be a true one-and-done experience for us — nothing was bad by any means, but for that kind of a schlep, and at those prices, there are old favorites we would rather return to and plenty of other restaurants to try out for future special occasions.  That said, I appreciated how pleasant they made our experience, with top-notch service and no stodgy, stuffy, precious pretentiousness.

Don’t worry, folks.  After this excursion into fine Disney dining and last week’s review of one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten (in Miami, no less!), I’ll be back to waxing poetic about sandwiches, discovering delis, and obsessing over sardines and mustards soon enough.  My vox populi is never gone for long!