Join me in welcoming guest author Lottie Linter with a review of The Steakhouse in the Disney Village at Disneyland Paris!

Unlike Walt Disney World’s Downtown Disney, the Disney Village at Disneyland Paris is where you’ll find most of the table service options at the resort. This is because the parks in Paris close very early (around 6 or 7PM) out of peak season, and not everybody wants to sit down to eat at 5:30PM, especially in Europe! We prefer to eat later, so we booked a table at The Steakhouse for 8PM on a Monday evening.

Atmosphere

From the outside, the restaurant looks a little non-descript, and with the enticing Planet Hollywood, Rainforest Café, and Annette’s Diner drawing in people nearby, it’s easy to overlook this place if you only walk through the main thoroughfare of the village. In fact having visited Disneyland Paris seven times previously, I didn’t even notice this restaurant until I was a Cast Member there a few years ago!

The entrance takes up just a small strip of the Disney Village facades, but once you are inside and down a short corridor lined with dark wooden paneling and a wine fridge, the restaurant opens out into an absolutely huge warehouse complete with a large conservatory area.

After checking in, you can wait at the old-fashioned bar and have a pre-dinner drink, but as we were visiting out of season the restaurant wasn’t full and we were shown straight to our table.

The dining room is very impressive, and is themed around the Chicago meat markets during the prohibition era. There are black and white photographs all over the walls of who I can only assume were supposed to be wealthy meat-traders, or market owners – it’s not immediately clear, but I do think they add something quirky to the décor.

One of the big walls is vintage-style painted brickwork, but it has been made to look like they pulled down the plaster from a more modern steak restaurant to discover the old meat warehouse underneath. The conservatory area has black and white tiled floors and looks towards Lake Disney, McDonald’s, and the building that houses the Rainforest Café.

We were pleased to be seated in the main warehouse area, and although our particular two-top was quite close to the one next to us, in general the rest of the tables seemed to be quite nicely spaced.

At busier times they also have live jazz playing in this restaurant, which I imagine would really take the atmosphere up a notch, but tonight we just had the sounds of the hustle and bustle in the dining room. If there was any music, we couldn’t hear it!

Eats

In France, they tend to eat from prix-fixe menus

– these are often made up of a select number of options from the à la carte menu but priced at a discount. The Steakhouse is no different, and offered up [Read more…]