Disney California Adventure is home to one of our favorite nighttime shows—World of Color. At our last trip to Disneyland Resort, we decided to try the World of Color Dessert Party. This dining event includes seating for the show, along with a selection of desserts and drinks. How did it measure up to our expectations? Let’s find out! Read on to see how our World of Color Dessert Party Experience went!
Basics and Booking
The World of Color Dessert Party is a separately paid dining event available at Disney California Adventure during most showings of World of Color. The reservation includes a seated view of the World of Color show, plus a selection of desserts and drinks.
As of this post, the World of Color Dessert Party costs $89 per guest, which includes taxes and gratuity. For the three of us, we paid $267 for this experience. You can book via the Disneyland website.
Checking In and Pre-Party
Check in is near the Eureka water wheel in the Grizzly Peak land. Our reservation was for 8PM and Disney advises you to “arrive at your reservation time.” Of course we swung by a bit earlier because when it comes to dessert parties you’ll almost always be able to check in before the time they give you.
We checked in at 7:10PM and were told we could return closer to 7:30. When we got back around 7:38 there was a pretty sizable collection of people. It wasn’t totally clear if it was a line or not, but everyone seemed to treat it like one.
At 8PM we made the walk over to the actual dessert party seating. The seating is over by The Little Mermaid ride, pretty centrally located as far as watching the show goes.
We were seated within 4 minutes of arrival. You can immediately see that our view was at least partially obstructed by fencing and fixtures.
Below is a look at some of the seating around us. I think a more centrally located seat would have been a little better. That said, none of the seats are perfect or right up against the water. In any case, luck of the draw.
Here’s a look at the menu, a plate of food, and the sipper Zoe’s drink came in as part of the Disney100 celebration.
We had our food and drinks by 8:10PM for the 9PM show. The server asked Emily if she wanted both of her alcoholic drinks at once, and she declined.
It turned out that this awkward suggestion was because it’s actually pretty tough to get service once you’ve been given your food and first round of drinks. There just isn’t enough staffing and our server was pretty much always moving at the speed of light from table to table. And if a bigger group has a pile of requests, well that takes a long time.
Service concludes at the start of the show, so make sure to get anything you’ll want before then. Overall the food was more than enough for us and we didn’t finish it all (we were given takeaway boxes after the show).
I’ve got no complaints about the quality of the food. It was all tasty and at least meets the standard for what I’d expect from a Disney dessert party.
The show started at 9PM. Here’s a gallery of our view, with commentary to follow in the next concluding section:
Is the World of Color Dessert Party Worth It?
Ultimately, nothing about the World of Color dessert party “wow”ed me, and I don’t think it’s worth the cost ($89 per person). When you’re talking about events like this, you can look at three sources of value:
Food and drink
Seating for the show
Anything else (mostly service)
Food and drink will basically never justify the bulk of the cost, at least not for us. I suspect that some foodies who love Instafamous treats might be won over by a “Birthday Macaron”, but the Disney parks tend to offer such good food—and particularly dessert/treat—options that the items at most every dessert party I’ve attended will always be comparatively lackluster.
The service for the dessert party was definitely underwhelming. I don’t blame the Cast Members who helped us —the problem was understaffing. We were served relatively quickly when seated, but very rarely heard from our server after that (and felt like we were being a bother simply for requesting our second drinks). It’s not as if our server was lounging about—they were very busy attending to the needs of other tables.
From what I’ve heard, this issue is made worse at second showings on nights with two showings because the Cast Members have extra work to do cleaning up.
This leaves the main perk as being able to watch World of Color from a seat with a view. I think this one winds up pretty simple. The view from these seats is only marginally better than the view you’d be able to get with a little advance arrival for the show anyways.
Our view was partially obstructed, as many views from the dessert party are. Did these small obstructions take away from the overall show? Honestly, not really, no. But that’s equally true of the views you can get without paying for a seat. So while I think the combination of having a seat and a decent view is on balance better than what I’d usually expect from a World of Color viewing, I don’t think the view is good enough to justify the cost of the event.
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