As a long time resident of Southern California and a Disney Pass Holder we have the luxury of going to Disneyland or the new park California Adventure when ever we please. As most of us Southern Californians know, the new park has not exactly taken off and with the exception of a few rides there was not a lot of reasons to visit. One of the reasons we visited the park was because of the one restaurant that served good wine in either park. The Wine Country Trattoria had a good wine list but very informal menu. When we saw that the restaurant was closing for renovation we thought it would reopen with not only a great wine list but a great menu.
We had our first opportunity to dine at the reopened restaurant two weeks ago. It was a fixed menu tied to the new 'World of Color" show. We thought it was a clever tie-in (leave it to Disney) that allowed anyone eating at the restaurant prefered standing (the show is SRO so if you want to sit and watch it, forget it) for the show. I have to say that for years and with the exception of the Club 33 restaurant in Disneyland there was no alcohol served anywhere. That could be the reason why it took so long for them to serve us an alcoholic beverage. Sort of a reluctance to serve alcohol! But then we realized that everything seemed to go that way. The service is very slow and we thought well they just relaunched so be patient. We did order a bottle of Italian wine (they have some very nice Italian wines on the list) and found out that our waiter was new at opening wine bottles. After the third try and two wasted bottles do to corks breaking off he finally got it served. I still mourn for those two bottles! The food is better than average and we felt that with the exception of the slow service we would give the place another try. Afterall if you sit on the balcony or on the front edge of the restaurant there is no better people watching in the world!
We decided to give the restaurant another try last night figuring that after a couple of weeks Disney would have worked out some of the issues we experienced. We again started with a drink that took 15 minutes to serve and he forgot an obvious important part of mine...the olives! He wanted to take the drink back but I held it as hostage until he returned with the olives!. We were in no hurry as we had already seen the show (well worth seeing by the way, supposedly the cost to create was north of 1 billion dollars!). What we didn't realize was that when we order one course at a time it would take 20 to 25 minutes to be served each course. We had no place we had to be so we hung in there. Again ordered a bottle of wine and the waiter looked at me and said, "I will have to have someone else serve you since I am not of age". Imagine that, you can serve a martini but not open a bottle of wine! Anyway, 25 minutes later a new waiter showed up with the wine and also struggled with the cork. It must be the cork! I asked the waiter how the lasagna was after having the Pork loin the week before and then realized I was asking a 20 year old boy about food! I never heard his response.
The reality is that the concept of having this nice resturant in the park is great but Disney falls well short in the area of service. Will be waiting for quite awhile before we head back. Maybe we'll just go to the bar upstairs and drink wine!
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