Good Morning Breakfast at Ravello

Many parents soldier through character meals as a way to delight their kids while they try to forget how much they are paying for mass-produced food in a loud and crowded room. If that feels painfully familiar, then I have the perfect recommendation for you! Good Morning Breakfast with Goofy and Pals at Ravello, in the Four Seasons Orlando, is the queen of character meals. The food is excellent and plentiful. The restaurant is spacious, and uncrowded even when fully booked. And the character interactions are unequaled by any other character meal that my family has experienced. Read on to learn more about this little-known option found within minutes of Magic Kingdom!

Good Morning Breakfast Logistics

Location and Transportation

Good Morning Breakfast with Goofy and Pals is offered at the Four Seasons Resort Orlando. The Four Seasons is in the community of Golden Oaks, tucked just to the east of Fort Wilderness Resort, and to the south and east of Magic Kingdom. This makes it especially convenient if you’re staying anywhere near the Magic Kingdom.

Golden Oaks is a gated community, so you’ll need to have a reservation for your meal in order to check in. Like most other resorts on Walt Disney World property, the guards at the gate will take your name and an ID to confirm your reservation and then allow you into the property.

This does mean that most Disney transportation cannot take you to the Four Seasons. Buses, boats and monorails don’t go here. So you’ll need a rental car, Uber/Lyft, or Minnie Van. If you drive yourself, only valet parking is available – but they’ll validate your parking at the restaurant anyway. Win-win! During our trip, we had a rental car and we were staying at Animal Kingdom Lodge, which is approximately as far away from the Four Seasons as possible if you’re on Disney property. Even still, it was only a 15-minute drive to the gates, and then another 3 or 4 minutes to the hotel.

Once you’re inside the gates, stay on the main road until it ends at the Four Seasons. Pay your Uber/Lyft/Minnie Van driver, or hand off your car to the valet, and head inside at the main entrance. You’ll go all the way to your right and then take the elevators down one floor, which will put you at the doors to Ravello!

Dates and Availability

At the time of writing, Good Morning Breakfast is offered at Ravello on Thursdays, Saturdays, and “select Tuesdays”. Those select Tuesdays seem to coincide with what we expect to be the most crowded weeks of the year – Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s nice that there appears to be an attempt to keep up with anticipated demand!

Unlike most other Walt Disney World restaurants, you cannot make reservations for this character breakfast 60 days in advance. Instead, reservations open 30 days before you plan on dining. Additionally, reservations are all through OpenTable. If you’re like me, that means you make a mental note to check back in a month while you’re making all of your other Disney dining reservations … and then totally forget about checking back at the 30-day window.

Thankfully, this breakfast is still a hidden gem. That meant that during the off season, reservations less than a week away had plenty of availability. And even now as crowds are picking back up, there are plenty of reservations for a party of four available on the nearest Thursday and Saturday. Still, to ensure your choice of reservation time, it’s best to make reservations as close to the opening of that 30-day window as possible.

Cost

If you research the cost of breakfast at Ravello, you’re likely to find conflicting information. That’s because Ravello offers a non-character breakfast buffet other days of the week (in addition to some ala carte chef’s specialties). The cost of the non-character buffet is $40 per adult and $20 per child.

But you get characters with this breakfast! And that makes it extra-special. So for Good Morning Breakfast with Goofy and Pals, you’ll pay $52 per adult and $32 per child. That’s like paying a premium of $12 per person for your character interactions. Could it possibly be worth that upcharge? More on that below, but let’s compare it to the cost of some other character breakfast options on property:

• Roughly the same as breakfast at Chef Mickey’s ($51 per adult and $33 per child)
• Much more than breakfast at Garden Grill ($42 per adult and $27 per child)
• More than breakfast at Cape May Cafe ($45 per adult and $29 per child)
• Much less than breakfast at Cinderella’s Royal Table ($65 per adult and $39 per child)
• Slightly less than breakfast at Akershus ($53 per adult and $34 per child)

I think Chef Mickey’s is a pretty appropriate comparison here. You’re getting some of the same characters, and a buffet breakfast near the Magic Kingdom. Chef Mickey’s absolutely wins for convenience if you’re relying on Disney transportation, but Ravello runs away with the competition if you care about ambiance, food, or quality time with the characters.

Good Morning Breakfast Atmosphere and Characters

As the name of the breakfast implies, the star of this show is Goofy. He spends the most time out in the dining room, and he travels with his own PhotoPass photographer. No other characters are technically guaranteed, but I’ve only ever heard of Mickey and Minnie joining Goofy at this breakfast. But the “Pals” name does give the restaurant (and Disney) flexibility to swap out the appearing characters if absolutely necessary.

A $12 per person upcharge for the appearance of three characters during your meal seemed to be pretty ridiculous to me … before we actually arrived. And then everything changed. The great thing about Ravello is that it feels more like a real-world restaurant than a Disney restaurant. And mostly that impacts table placement. Disney maximizes the number of tables per square foot, with just enough space for servers (and characters) to pass through. This usually leaves me feeling like I have to become very close friends with the surrounding tables if I even want to lean backward or sideways to get a better picture of my kids with the characters. Ravello, in contrast, is gloriously spread out. You can see the floor. The characters had room to dance, play with each other, and have the whole party stand up to get a posed picture with them – with no other tables even in view.

All of that extra space also means there aren’t as many people packed in and clamoring for their time with the characters as they move throughout the restaurant. That meant each character had time for individual interactions with each member of our family, multiple poses for pictures, art coloring critiques, discussions about how awesome Mickey was in Fantasmic, and even impromptu dance parties!

… and that was all just during one rotation. We were at breakfast for approximately an hour, and each character came to visit us twice. In between, they took a quick break, and had some interactions with each other that everyone could see. Our family has done a large number of character meals at parks and resorts, and this easily doubled the interaction time (and quality) of the next-best meal that I can remember. And that one was breakfast at Garden Grill the day before Irma threatened to hit the parks in 2017, when there were about 3 filled tables in the whole restaurant.

The spread-out tables and lengthy character interactions combine to make a fun but decidedly relaxed atmosphere in the restaurant at breakfast. Which as a parent at Disney, is priceless. My kids had the space they needed to be kids. They got up and danced and moved and had fun. And there were other kids doing the same. But that combination of energy didn’t add up to noisy chaos like it does in most Disney restaurants. Because everyone was spread out enough that their noise and activity didn’t overlap and compete. I left breakfast feeling calm and happy and full.

Good Morning Breakfast Food

If your character meals are less about the characters and more about the meal, don’t fret – Ravello has you covered. This is an extensive buffet with not only plenty of options for the “safe” eaters in the group, but also some more adventurous options for those who like to think beyond eggs, bacon, fruit, and pastries.

Most importantly, you can tell that thanks to the lower capacity of the restaurant, fake eggs don’t have to be pumped out by the gallon. And pastries don’t have to be mass-produced by the thousands. There is real jelly and honey and jam in jars, and round pats of butter that taste like butter instead of some mildly flavored oil spread.

If you did happen to just want eggs and bacon and fruit and pastries, you still have a much bigger selection than you would find at your normal breakfast buffet. Our kids especially enjoyed the mini chocolate chip muffins and the wide selection of fruit – even though I couldn’t trick them into trying grapefruit! The croissants were surprisingly good for a buffet, and the warm mini cinnamon rolls were a highlight.

There is an omelet station, with very little wait, but none of us wanted to dedicate that much stomach volume to a single dish. But in the same area you could find scrambled eggs, frittata, bacon, sausage, pancakes, waffles (sadly, the non-Mickey version) as well as all of the fixings your heart could desire!

There was also a portion of the buffet that leaned more to the lunch side of brunch (or maybe to the slightly European breakfast taste), with a salad station, caprese, and rotating cheese and meat selections. I tried the brie, gruyere, mozzarella, and at least three different meats. These were paired with a rotating bread board and spread. Had we stayed longer, I would have gladly kept making myself several tiny charcuterie plates as we sat and relaxed.

Is Good Morning Breakfast Right For You?

1. If you are relying on Disney transportation, you first have to decide if you’re willing to pay for transportation over the Four Seasons. If you’re staying in the Magic Kingdom area, that should be relatively cheap and easy. It’s a little bit of a haul from other areas of the resort.
2. The second decision point is if you want to take time away from the park to have a relaxed breakfast on a Thursday or Saturday. If you already have a rest day or late start planned, then this is easy to fit into your schedule. But if you like being in the park all day every day, this isn’t the choice for you.
3. If you’ve done character meals before and have sworn them off because of the chaos and noise and short time with characters with crazy-crowded pictures … this may be your reintroduction to the world of dining with characters. You get time and space and real interactions instead of just pictures. It’s a perfect way to get quality time with classic characters. You can save real time in the parks if you’ve already met Mickey and Minnie at breakfast!
4. If your party has mixed breakfast tastes, like kids that just eat carbs and fruit, but a grandparent that wants fancy yogurts and meats and cheeses, and a dad that needs to load up on bacon and waffles … everyone can be happy here. Happy with plentiful high-quality food!

I’m already thinking about booking another Ravello meal for a future Disney trip. Have you been, or are you considering Good Morning breakfast in the future?