The BIZARRE Thing That Happened to Me During a Disney World Character Meal

As part of my job, I spend a lot of time alone in Disney World restaurants, including character meals!

Magic Kingdom

Character meals can be pretty challenging to review, because there’s a lot of content to capture (especially if they’re buffet meals!), but they’re generally a lot of fun. They’ve even made me a lot better at interacting with characters! However, what happens when the characters don’t actually show up? That happened to me recently and it was a WILD ride.

I recently experienced a restaurant FIRST for most of our team here at DFB, and that’s pretty hard to do when we’ve been dining in Disney World for decades. But during a recent trip to Crystal Palace in Magic Kingdom, I sat at my table for more than an hour with NO characters stopping by.

Crystal Palace

In case you didn’t know, Crystal Palace is a character meal with Winnie the Pooh and friends (typically Tigger, Eeyore, and Piglet). It’s also a buffet for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I had a reservation right at 11AM and was seated around 11:10AM. As I was seated, Tigger and Piglet had just passed my table group, so my server told me they’d be the last characters I would see, but that they’d come back around later. I wasn’t worried, as this has happened before to me at character meals.

Autograph Card

I went on with my meal as usual, ordering my drink, and making my plate. I ate that plate of food and then went back to grab some lunch eats from the buffet. (They start swapping the buffet from breakfast to lunch around 11AM, so if you go around that time, you’ll get to eat both!) All of that took a significant amount of time, but still, I hadn’t seen Eeyore and Pooh, who were supposed to come out next.

Crystal Palace breakfast buffet

In fact, by the time I completely finished my restaurant review, I’d been there for more than an hour and hadn’t seen any characters — they hadn’t even returned to my side of the restaurant since Tigger and Piglet’s departure! This was a first for me, and thankfully, my server recognized the problem and reported it to a manager.

Eeyore!

Within a few minutes, a manager had stopped at my table and the table next to me (who’d also gotten skipped) to apologize and offer compensation for my time. In this particular circumstance, I was offered my choice of Lightning Lane access to any ride in the park (except for TRON Lightcycle / Run) or a pass to return to the restaurant later in the day and meet the characters at my convenience. I declined both options and asked to just remain and wait to meet the characters, which they were happy to let me do.

Piglet

Tigger, Piglet, and Eeyore came in fairly quick succession after that. I was told by my server that Pooh was having a “slower” day, so his meet and greet was moved to the middle of the restaurant. By the time I met all four, I hadn’t even been at the restaurant for two hours. (I’ve definitely had other character meals last longer than that!)

Pooh in the middle of the restaurant

So ultimately, the team at Crystal Palace was very kind and accommodating. If you find yourself with an issue similar to this in the future, make sure to be patient and kind when mentioning it to your server. Sometimes the characters won’t stop at your table right away because of the way their rotation works, but if you go more than an hour without seeing them and they’re not on their way, it might be a good idea to speak up in case you were accidentally skipped.

Keep in mind that you may not be offered the same compensation I was if this happens to your family. It varies depending on the restaurant and the day.

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