Walt Disney World is changing the menu at Be Our Guest Restaurant yet again, as the once #1 Magic Kingdom dining spot continues to struggle in a post “revenge travel” environment. Here are the new menu items, plus why we hope this is a sign that the Beauty and the Beast eatery will soon revert to pre-COVID normal, and more.
Be Our Guest Restaurant was once iconic, but is now polarizing. Ask 10 different Walt Disney World fans what they think of it and you’ll likely to get 10 very passionate answers. Some love it, even more now hate it. When it comes to overrated restaurants at Walt Disney World, Be Our Guest Restaurant is the one we hear mentioned most frequently by readers. For our part, we’ve been fortunate with positive experiences at Be Our Guest Restaurant and have dined here over a dozen times since it debuted over a decade ago.
With that said, a lot has changed since Be Our Guest opened, and the restaurant is inarguably a shadow of its former self in some regards. The table service dinner expanded to replace the beloved counter service lunch. Once one of the best uses of a Disney Dining Plan credit, it’s now a laughable use of 2 credits. Breakfast still isn’t back. The prix fixe service that debuted to replace the a la carte table service menu has been scaled back and some entrees have been simplified. Thankfully, that last point is seemingly being remedied in part with the latest menu updates…
Be Our Guest Restaurant at Magic Kingdom is debuting several new and updated menu items on Wednesday, July 16, 2025. Walt Disney World revealed these new menu or refreshed items:
- French Onion Soup au Gratin: Rich beef broth, sherry wine, and swiss cheese
- Mixed Greens Salad (Plant-based): Tomato, cucumber, and dijon vinaigrette
- Endive and Walnut Salad: Roquefort, green apple, radicchio, and champagne vinaigrette
- Steak Frites: Slow-roasted butcher’s steak, house-cut french fries, and red wine sauce
- Pan-Roasted Arctic Char: Roasted potatoes, charred tomatoes, shaved fennel, and citrus-caper brown butter
- Poulet Rouge Chicken: Roasted potatoes, stewed pepper pipérade, and sweet corn velouté
- Crème Brûlée Tart: Orange custard, passion fruit meringue, and chantilly cream
- Blooming Rose: Chocolate cake topped with “The Grey Stuff”
Here are photos of the new menu items coming soon to Be Our Guest Restaurant:
Some of these dishes are strikingly similar to what’s currently being offered, so “new” isn’t entirely apt.
For example, the Poulet Rouge Chicken is a staple at Be Our Guest, so the core difference here is potentially the preparation and the accompaniments. Gone are the ‘sweet Potatoes, seasonal vegetables, and whole-grain mustard sauce’ in favor of what you see listed above.
There are a couple more instances of changes like that. The iconic French Onion Soup is swapping in swiss cheese, and the Mixed Greens Salad is mixing up new greens. These two strike me as fairly inconsequential, although I’d probably take a “don’t fix what isn’t broken” attitude with that fan-favorite soup.
In case you don’t closely follow the Magic Kingdom dining scene, Be Our Guest Restaurant has only served the prix fixe menu since the COVID closure. This means it’s only table service, with the same appetizer, entree, and dessert options all day long. It has been this way since Magic Kingdom reopened, and remains the case over 5 years later.
That prix fixe menu was controversial when it debuted for dinner pre-closure, and suffice to say, it has not won over any fans in the last 5-plus years. Even those of us who still enjoy and defend Be Our Guest Restaurant have to concede that the value proposition is worse than it was pre-closure.
Honestly, I’d go as far as to say it’s much worse than before. And keep in mind that I’m one of the biggest defenders of Be Our Guest Restaurant. So if this is what even I’m willing to admit, you can probably imagine how much harsher the sentiment is among its fiercest critics!
By contrast, the counter lunch at Be Our Guest Restaurant was pretty much universally beloved prior to the closure. It was near the top of our list of the Best Counter Service Restaurants at Walt Disney World, and was an exceptional value on the Disney Dining Plan. There were very few fans who didn’t love lunch at Be Our Guest. Unfortunately, that counter service meal has been replaced with an all-day lunch/dinner menu since the reopening.
With that shift, the mostly-beloved Breakfast at Be Our Guest Restaurant also vanished. We qualify that with a “mostly” because it was pricey when paying out of pocket and arguably not worth the cost. Nevertheless, that morning meal was great from a Disney Dining Plan use of counter service credits perspective and also for rope dropping Fantasyland attractions. We loved breakfast at Be Our Guest Restaurant for these reasons. It was a great experience.
The commonality between those two meals was actually that both were great experiences, and affordable options for stepping inside Beast’s Castle. The cuisine might’ve had its lows and highs (mostly highs for lunch), but very few fans ever felt “ripped off” by those meals because the whole package was so strong. By contrast, I would say the prevailing sentiment about the current prix fixe menus at Be Our Guest Restaurant is that they’re a rip-off. And again, I say this as someone who still enjoys it!
As we wrote back in Big Little Things Walt Disney World Needs to Bring Back, moving to the same prix fixe menu for lunch and dinner was the right move for Be Our Guest Restaurant at one point. Table service dining was in high-demand, guests were spending freely as pent-up demand played out, and there were staffing shortages that reduced capacity.
That time is over, and has been for over two years! Be Our Guest Restaurant is no longer as popular as it once was. It’s gone from the single-most difficult Advance Dining Reservation (ADR) in all of Walt Disney World to one of the easiest. This is despite the inherent advantage of being an in-castle restaurant at Magic Kingdom themed to Beauty and the Beast.
ADR availability is plentiful, as are spots on the Walk-Up Waitlist. The last three times I’ve dined at Be Our Guest, the restaurant was less than half full and the server to guest ratio was surprisingly high. The story here is now one about how the mighty have fallen, with the hype and FOMO feedback cycle completely reversing. Tale as old as time.
At this point, I’m skeptical there’s even a “but Disney is a business” justification for Be Our Guest Restaurant to be prix fixe all-day. It’s not filling tables like this or even coming anywhere close most of the time. At some point, that $72 menu becomes a liability, and they’d be better off actually filling tables at ~$20 a pop (and with a faster churn rate).
Based on what I’ve observed, I would argue that time arrived a while ago. It’s wholly unclear why bigger changes haven’t been made. Perhaps inertia, complacency or good ole fashioned laziness? It could just be that Walt Disney World is slow to do anything, and far more lagging and reactionary than many fans believe. They might recognize there’s an issue, and it’s slated to be addressed after many more meetings and brainstorming sessions in Fall 2027.
While the financial incentives are obviously debatable and I’m not privy to Disney’s guest spending data, the guest satisfaction gains would be fairly undeniable. This is doubly true since the counter service restaurant and breakfast ‘scene’ at Magic Kingdom is fairly bleak.
Not only is it bad, but it’s busy. Nothing adds to the “joy” of a mediocre meal at Cosmic Ray’s or Pinocchio Village Haus like waiting in a long line, having to hunt for a table, and then sitting in one of the most chaotic seating areas on the face of the earth.
Bringing back the counter service lunch and breakfast at Be Our Guest would be fun–memorable meals that would allow more guests to step inside Beast’s Castle. Be Our Guest Restaurant is still a winner from a thematic perspective, and experiencing that leave a lasting impression on a lot of kids and their families. It would be a nice meal plus a pleasant setting, making for an easy guest satisfaction win. Take the win, Walt Disney World–you could use one!
While we’re at it, bring back the dedicated Beast meet & greet for dinner. This smile and wave from a distance stopped making sense 2 years ago. They tested the Beast meet & greet last summer…but it was gone again last time we dined at Be Our Guest, with Cast Members simply saying that the “test ended.” What’s there to test?! It’s a nice ending to an expensive meal!
That Beast meet & greets was one of the little touches that made dinner at Be Our Guest Restaurant “worth it” despite the high price tag. Now, it’s more expensive despite a scaled back menu and no meet & greet. Even the Disney Dining Plan hasn’t helped revive the restaurant’s popularity–probably because it’s far and away the worst 2-credit option available.
Hopefully Walt Disney World is starting to realize it has a problem with Be Our Guest Restaurant? That’s really the first step, and this menu change is at least suggestive of that. The next step is realizing that this won’t move the needle at all. What’s needed is a complete overhaul–or rather, pulling from the 2019 playbook and reverting to what actually worked.
To end this on a somewhat positive note, I’m pleased to see the dessert options changing at Be Our Guest. The Dessert Trio that’s been available for a while now is incredibly underwhelming and not befitting of a (supposedly) Signature Dining Experience. The Blooming Rose sounds like a fun twist on the classic “Grey Stuff” and the Crème Brûlée Tart looks a bit more upscale than what we’ve seen before at Be Our Guest.
As we’ve noted in several past reviews, dessert has been the weakest link here for a while. That’s one of many points discussed in our comprehensive review: Is Be Our Guest Restaurant Still Worth the Money? That covers the full current menu and what the experience is like now, cuisine quality, Advance Dining Reservation difficulty, and more. Something worth reading if you’d like more positivity about Be Our Guest and whether it’s worth the splurge. Because again, it may not read like it here, but we actually love this restaurant!
Ultimately, we’re really just ready for improvements to Magic Kingdom’s dining scene. Sure, we recently got big wins with Pecos Bill and the waffles at Sleepy Hollow, but in fairness, those changes were mostly about undoing unforced errors. Neither of those restaurants are better than they were in 2019, and the Magic Kingdom restaurant roster as a whole is far worse.
There’s arguably only one other dining option in the entire Magic Kingdom that stacks up to Be Our Guest Restaurant, and that has a more adventurous menu that won’t appeal to picky eaters. Cinderella’s Royal Table can be a fantastic option, but it’s not as universally accessible as regular restaurants.
We’ve long acknowledged that Be Our Guest Restaurant is polarizing, with fan opinion typically falling either in the “love it” or “hate it” camps. Recently, we’re noticing more and more converts to the “hate it” camp. Even though we love Be Our Guest Restaurant, it’s also plainly obvious to us that the restaurant has problems that need to be fixed. You can love something and still want it to be the best version of itself, so more people see what you see in that thing (sentiment that applies to critique of Walt Disney World as a whole and, I suppose, life in general).
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YOUR THOUGHTS
What do you think of the menu additions and changes at Be Our Guest Restaurant? Think this is a sign of more changes to come at Magic Kingdom’s once-best restaurant, or are we getting our hopes up for nothing? What are your thoughts on Be Our Guest Restaurant, generally? Do you think it’s worth the money? Is it overhyped and/or overrated? Would you rather do a table service meal elsewhere in Magic Kingdom, or is this the best option? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!